Mistral点评

• U.S. lawmakers ignore China warning, meet with Taiwan’s new leader
• ByteDance and Kuaishou see exodus of top AI experts to new ventures as China’s unicorn boom looks for next OpenAI
• China unveils plan to keep officials’ noses clean in campaign to control financial risk
• China-Russia ties expose a Republican foreign policy blind spot
• Can Japan, China resolve ‘deeply politicised’ Fukushima water issue? Experts say neither side able to back down
• Tech war: China doubles down on semiconductor self-sufficiency drive with US$47.5 billion Big Fund III
• North Korea condemns China, South Korea, Japan over denuclearisation talks at summit: ‘grave political provocation’
• Chinese state media warns AI could worsen job discrimination and break labour laws
• China property: Shanghai relaxes home buying restrictions, grants subsidies for new flats to revive sector
• In Xinjiang, China’s security chief calls for ‘normalisation of counterterrorism’
• President Xi Jinping to welcome Arab state leaders to China, with Israel-Gaza war, Palestine and trade on the agenda
• It is the ‘Olympics’ of Chinese cuisine – and Hong Kong won gold and silver in the group categories
• Is the EU de-risking for economic security or is it ‘hostile’ and anti-China?
• As cash-strapped Pakistan seeks to ease its China reliance, Saudi, UAE pledge billions
• China premier agrees on cooperation with Seoul, Tokyo but issues veiled rebuke against their US ties
• Star US gene-editing scientist Zhang Feng pays rare visit to China’s top university
• South China Sea: Beijing risks conflict with Philippines over ‘Monster’ ship to enforce anti-trespassing policy
• Victims of Indonesia’s anti-Chinese riots cling to hope for justice as painful memories fester
• Philippines split over divorce bill, rail travel in Malaysia, the women who painted China: 5 weekend reads you missed
• Chinese ships spotted near disputed East China Sea islets every day this year, Japan says
• ‘No limits’ partnership or ‘priority partners’: China, Russia seek to define relationship as Western pressure mounts
• Outspoken head of China’s foreign ministry press corps, Hua Chunying, promoted to deputy foreign minister
• China has threatened trade with some countries after feuds. They’re calling ‘the firm’ for help
• Chinese scientists report world first as they cure patient’s diabetes with cell therapy
• AIA eyes more property assets in mainland China to house operations as insurance business charts strong growth
• Climate change: Hong Kong, mainland China firms trail regional peers for credibility of emissions targets, MSCI study finds
• Fans swoon over most ‘handsome’ China scientist, 87, whose younger-self good looks resemble those of actor Daniel Wu
• What lesson does Stalin’s Cold War ‘mistake’ have for Russia, China and the US today? A Chinese historian weighs in
• China’s middle class still jittery about spending – especially on property, survey finds

U.S. lawmakers ignore China warning, meet with Taiwan’s new leader

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/27/taiwan-meeting-congress-china/2024-05-27T07:39:19.727Z

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A bipartisan delegation of U.S. lawmakers met Monday with Taiwan’s new leader Lai Ching-te, the first such visit since Lai’s inauguration last week, in what the lawmakers and Taiwanese officials said demonstrates the steadfastness of U.S. support for Taiwan at a time of escalating tensions with China.

China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory even though the Chinese Communist Party has never ruled the island, last week responded to Lai’s inauguration with large-scale military drills, surrounding the island in a blockade-style exercise that involved more than a hundred aircraft and dozens of warships.

“America is and always will be a reliable partner, and no amount of coercion or intimidation will slow down or stop the routine visits by the Congress to Taiwan,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and leader of the delegation, said Monday at a joint news conference with Lai.

McCaul, who traveled with Reps. Young Kim (R-Calif.), Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), Andy Barr (R-Ky.), Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), said the delegation had come to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to Taiwan and understand the new Lai administration’s priorities and objectives — a typically bipartisan approach for U.S. administrations and lawmakers, but also one that Republicans have increasingly scrutinized as China ramps up its military displays and other actions to isolate Taiwan.

China has criticized U.S. interactions with Taiwan, particularly by high-level officials, as a violation of the sovereignty it claims over the island. In 2022, in reaction to a visit to Taiwan by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), China launched a barrage of missiles into the sea near Taiwan in a retaliatory show of force.

“China urges relevant U.S. lawmakers to stop playing the ‘Taiwan card,’ stop meddling in China’s internal affairs, stop supporting and indulging ‘Taiwan independence’ secessionist forces, and stop damaging China-U.S. relations and the peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in a news briefing Monday, after Lai’s televised meeting with the lawmakers.

The United States has maintained formal relations with China since 1979, under a one-China policy that acknowledges Beijing’s claims over the island democracy without endorsing them. But it also has less formal ties with Taiwan, operating the American Institute in Taiwan — an embassy in all but name — and selling arms to Taiwan to help it defend itself.

The island has also seen a dramatic uptick in congressional visits over the past three years, as lawmakers have expressed growing concerns about the potential of a Chinese invasion of the island. Last year, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) hosted Lai’s predecessor at a gathering of members of Congress in California, marking the highest-level meeting to date on U.S. soil. The rise in such exchanges has infuriated Beijing.

Last week, the Chinese government took the rare step of calling for an end to congressional delegations to Taiwan, going beyond its more general opposition to interactions between Taiwanese and U.S. officials.

“They sent me a warning: ‘Do not visit Taiwan because you’re in violation of the one-China policy,’” McCaul told reporters Monday at a joint news conference with Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Lin Chia-Lung. “I say to them: They’re in violation.”

In a largely symbolic move, China also has issued sanctions against U.S. lawmakers. Most recently, Beijing sanctioned former U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who served until recently as chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and has called for a more confrontational U.S. policy toward China. In May, months after Gallagher led a congressional delegation to Taiwan, Beijing said it would freeze the congressman’s current and future assets in China and deny him entry to the country. The Hudson Institute, a think tank where Gallagher serves as a fellow, said he had no assets there.

Beijing also distrusts Lai, who advocated earlier in his career for Taiwan’s formal independence, and whom Beijing has branded a “worker for Taiwan independence.” Lai has since tempered his views and is now a key proponent of his party’s efforts to maintain peace with Beijing while repelling its aggression.

Lai pledged in his inaugural speech to continue his predecessor’s approach to maintaining the cross-strait status quo. But Lai and the visiting American lawmakers on Monday also spoke of their determination to increase the island’s cooperation with Washington, and the need to bolster Taiwan’s defenses.

“I deeply admire former president Ronald Reagan’s approach of ‘peace through strength,’” Lai said Monday in his first remarks as president to international media. “Therefore, moving forward, I will enhance reform of and bolster national defense, demonstrating to the world the Taiwanese people’s determination to defend our homeland.”

He thanked Congress for its recent approval of supplemental security assistance for Taiwan. “We will continue to deepen cooperation with the U.S. and other like-minded countries to jointly maintain regional peace, stability and prosperous development,” Lai said.

The United States cut its formal ties with Taiwan as part of its official recognition of China. It has continued under multiple administrations to have an informal relationship with Taiwan, under the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act. The 1979 act authorizes U.S. funding for Taiwan’s defenses, and lays out U.S. opposition for any moves by China to seize or harass the island.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly in recent years indicated that China is willing to take Taiwan by force, if necessary, and has said that China’s “reunification” with Taiwan, now a self-governing island of 23 million people, is “inevitable.”

The Biden administration and Congress have gradually expanded U.S. support for Taiwan in response, including $4 billion in the recently approved security assistance for the region. McCaul reiterated that support but added that “we do have to be careful with certain red lines we know the PRC has — not to cross those lines, because that would end up in a catastrophic war,” referring to China by its official name, the People’s Republic of China. McCaul did not say how lawmakers define those red lines.

But with a U.S. presidential election looming, Republicans have also been increasingly critical of Biden’s foreign policy agenda, including what they characterize as an insufficiently bold response to Chinese aggression.

“We need to communicate strength and deterrence to Communist China, which means that we follow through with these defense articles,” Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), a co-chair of the congressional Taiwan Caucus and a delegation member, said in an interview Monday. Barr added that the United States needed to become “more integrated” with Taiwan “militarily, economically and diplomatically.”

ByteDance and Kuaishou see exodus of top AI experts to new ventures as China’s unicorn boom looks for next OpenAI

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3264317/bytedance-and-kuaishou-see-exodus-top-ai-experts-new-ventures-chinas-unicorn-boom-looks-next-openai?utm_source=rss_feed

Chinese social media giants ByteDance and Kuaishou Technology, which operate the country’s two largest short video platforms, have seen an exodus of top artificial intelligence (AI) experts amid increased investor interest in start-ups that could become the next OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT.

Yang Hongxia, who was involved in research and development of large language models (LLMs) at ByteDance, recently left the Beijing-based company to start preparing for her own AI projects, according to a report by Chinese media 36Kr. LLMs are the technology behind generative AI services like ChatGPT.

Separately, Fu Ruiji – a tech leader at Kuaishou’s Knowledge Graph and LLM projects – left the firm to “prepare for an AI start-up project”, Chinese media outlet LingTai reported.

Details of Yang and Fu’s new endeavours are unclear. They could not be reached for comment.

Both ByteDance and Kuaishou did not immediately reply to requests for comment on Monday.

The departure of those experts reflect China’s new unicorn boom that has so far yielded four “AI tigers”, each of which has raised billions of dollars from deep-pocketed investors.

These new mainland unicorns – start-ups valued at more than US$1 billion – include Baichuan, Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and MiniMax.

Yang reportedly joined ByteDance to lead the firm’s AI Lab and build its LLM after her late-2022 exit from Alibaba Group Holding, where she headed the team overseeing the Hangzhou-based company’s M6 AI model. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Before joining Kuaishou in 2021, Fu served as the vice-director at the AI research arm of iFlytek, one of China’s AI champions. He was in charge of the development of Kuaipedia, dubbed as the world’s first “large-scale multi-modal short-video encyclopedia”, and KwaiAgents, an information-seeking agent system with LLMs.

Wang Changhu, who used to head ByteDance’s vision technology unit, was among a number of AI experts that had left the company in the past three years. In 2023, Wang started his own company called AIsphere and secured a fresh round of financing in March.

Alibaba, which has invested heavily in developing its Tongyi Qianwen AI models, has also seen the departure of a number of top AI specialists since last year. Jia Yangqing, who previously led the computing platform department of Alibaba’s cloud unit, reportedly left the company early last year to join a start-up focused on AI infrastructure.

As such, China’s Big Tech companies – including internet search giant Baidu, telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies and Alibaba – are all striving hard to attract top-tier AI talent with competitive salaries and generous benefits.

Budget shopping platform operator Pinduoduo, for example, last November ramped up job advertisements for various positions, including offering up to 60,000 yuan (US$8,282) per month for roles like LLM developers and LLM referencing engineers based in its Shanghai headquarters.

China unveils plan to keep officials’ noses clean in campaign to control financial risk

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3264306/china-unveils-plan-keep-officials-noses-clean-campaign-control-financial-risk?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s Politburo – a high-level decision-making body of the country’s Communist Party – reviewed a pilot accountability mechanism for financial de-risking on Monday, the latest offensive in Beijing’s campaign to address deep-rooted hazards in the financial system and the crisis-plagued property sector.

The blueprint for how to keep financial actors like watchdogs, state-owned financial institutions and local cadres more accountable comes at a time when Beijing has redoubled its efforts to shore up the troubled real estate market and strengthen local regulatory regimes, all while taking steps to ensure it can meet its annual gross domestic product growth target of around 5 per cent this year.

“[The plan] is aimed at entrenching the party’s leadership and consolidating the responsibilities of regulators, financial institutions and local authorities in the financial field,” according to a readout of the meeting from Xinhua.

At the meeting, chaired by President Xi Jinping, cadres at all levels were urged to establish a “correct concept of performance” for the implementation of directives on financial supervision and risk management.

More stringent implementation, oversight and punishment was also encouraged to ensure financial regulation has teeth.

Xi declared risk prevention and mitigation an “eternal theme” governing all finance policy at October’s twice-a-decade central financial work conference. The president has also named stronger oversight from the party against risks, both from home and abroad, as a pillar of his ambitions for the country to become a “financial superpower”.

Fu Weigang, executive president of the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law think tank, said the new accountability system is Beijing’s reminder that officials cannot pursue growth at the cost of bringing risks to the financial system.

“For years, quite a lot of local officials ignored financial discipline as they pursued reckless growth or their own promotion and created or exacerbated risks,” Fu said. “Also, local cadres usually aided and abetted unchecked loaning and other financial misconduct by local banks.

“The situation has become so rampant that Beijing feels the need to set up such an accountability mechanism to rein them in.”

Having said that, Fu added that the emphasis on risk management does not run counter to Beijing’s stance conveyed at Xi’s meeting with business leaders last week.

“The accountability system is focused on financial risks, presumably the banking sector,” Fu said. “Beijing’s pro-business drive is much broader and more comprehensive. Local officials, while told to control risks, are also being mandated by Beijing to create and optimise the business environment.”

Since 2023, Beijing has overhauled the financial regulatory structure, creating the high-powered Central Financial Commission for direct party oversight and additional state organs like the National Financial Regulatory Administration to bolster existing institutions. The role of the central bank has been remoulded, and lenders have been mandated to better serve national strategies and the real economy while keeping a careful eye on potential risk.

These changes have been made – in part – to address severe threats to financial stability, as distress in the property sector and mounting debts have ensnared developers, banks and some local governments.

An intensified rivalry with the West over a number of issues – and the financial vulnerabilities that could emerge if competition grows more fierce – has seen Beijing promote the overseas use of the yuan, the national currency. It has developed independent financial infrastructure for international settlements, along with other contingency plans.

Last week, Premier Li Qiang said at a meeting on the financial work of local governments that the reform of their management systems must be completed in a timely manner to create an overlapping effect with similar efforts from the central government, and that local cadres must keep systemic financial risks at top of mind in all circumstances.

Ding Zhijie, director of the research centre of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, said China must promote financial de-risking and safeguard security as the bottom line – particularly as the country opens wider to the rest of the world.

“We need to guide financial institutions to help defuse the risk of [local government] financing vehicles through debt restructuring, swaps or other tools,” he said at the Tsinghua PBCSF Global Finance Forum in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, on Monday.

Acknowledging that some small banks face pressure in their operations, Ding added that it was necessary to “strengthen monitoring and analysis” of the real estate sector. “Financial institutions need to ensure policy implementation and help build a new development model for the property market.”

China-Russia ties expose a Republican foreign policy blind spot

https://www.scmp.com/opinion/world-opinion/article/3264207/china-russia-ties-expose-republican-foreign-policy-blind-spot?utm_source=rss_feed

The hug that Chinese President Xi Jinping gave his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin earlier this month, along with the many other expressions of mutual support, made clear which side Beijing is taking on Russia’s war against Ukraine, and underscored the foreign policy problem that the US Republican Party has.

How does one proceed in portraying China as the most pressing threat facing the US, which has been a political imperative for both American political parties in recent years, when Russia continues to integrate its economy with China’s while trying to bombard its neighbour into submission?

As Putin makes dark references to Russia’s nuclear capabilities, it’s becoming impossible to avoid mentioning Moscow as equally dangerous, and if we look closely enough we can see a growing effort by the Republican Party to lay the blame for the Sino-Russian partnership entirely at US President Joe Biden’s feet and use it as an election issue.

To get into this, let’s be clear about the Republican Party’s new ideological foundation: the liberal international order that the party’s earlier incarnation forged over decades – where free markets and civil society initiatives have broadened political power bases throughout the West – is now seen by the party of today as more dangerous than anything that Moscow and Beijing might have done to undermine it.

In other words, better to strangle independent media and a judiciary that might question efforts to subvert elections as well as regularly employ Nazi rhetoric than to allow transgender people to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity

In the Republican Party, the respect for autocrats used to be mostly limited to Trump himself and the most fervent among his base. Just last week, for example, he proclaimed that Putin, Xi and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, are “at the top of their game” while denigrating the US.

Trump has managed to get away with these comments because they’re often just one small part of his usual meandering vortex of rhetorical extremes that echo white supremacist and Christian nationalist backwash.

But now others in Trump’s orbit, many with better foreign policy bona fides, are joining in to seed the ground for the new positioning that the entire party will need to adopt as part of the effort to unwind what it did globally in the second half of the 20th century.

Cue Michael Pillsbury, a well-respected China analyst, now with the Heritage Foundation, who has long been out in front when it comes to the argument for the hardest line possible against Beijing.

He doesn’t deny that Beijing and Moscow are much closer now. However, Pillsbury is asserting that not only is Biden responsible for the hell that Putin has unleashed on Ukraine, but that he’s also culpable for not supporting negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.

Putin has no intention of giving up an inch of Ukrainian land that his forces occupy, and will use any means at his disposal to keep it. So what good are negotiations unless the parties involved are prepared to accept this condition?

Aside from the allegation that Biden is the real villain, Pillsbury came out with a line straight from Moscow’s propaganda machine: “We need some kind of negotiations over the Ukraine.”

Anyone at his level knows that using the article “the” before Ukraine was the way that the Soviet Union referred to the area. The article was dropped when Ukraine gained its independence.

This is not an insignificant verbal slip. It is part of a reframing of the situation that prepares the ground for the ultimate shift that Republicans need to make to achieve their new geopolitical aims.

Over time, the new Republican Party will not side with a democratic Taiwan against the Beijing-Moscow partnership which has become a military industrial behemoth pushing nationalist-populist agendas. When it comes to international power projection, it will be much easier for the Republican Party to deal with like-minded players like Putin and Xi than it will be to cater to the agendas of the world’s democracies.

Pillsbury isn’t the only traditional Republican who’s embracing the Trumpist extremes. Nikki Haley, Trump’s most formidable opponent in the Republican Party primary, who put up some valiant fights against the Russians when she was the former president’s UN ambassador, now says she’s prepared to vote for him.

The question isn’t whether the Republican Party will side with the world’s autocrats. It already is. It’s whether their twisting of the truth will persuade enough American voters to go along with them.

Can Japan, China resolve ‘deeply politicised’ Fukushima water issue? Experts say neither side able to back down

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3264294/can-japan-china-resolve-deeply-politicised-fukushima-water-issue-experts-say-neither-side-able-back?utm_source=rss_feed

The bickering between Japan and China over the release of treated water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant has continued on the sidelines of the three-way summit in Seoul with South Korea, with analysts suggesting that neither government is able to back down.

“The issue has become deeply politicised and neither side can afford to step back,” said Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi, an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Tokyo.

“Japan’s position is that it has complied with IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] guidelines on data from the plant and been open in sharing that information, so it should not have to do more to please China,” he told This Week in Asia.

China was unable to accept that position “if it cannot get something in return”, Hinata-Yamaguchi said, as that would look to a domestic audience suspiciously like it was capitulating to Tokyo after taking a resolutely firm line on the issue.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida held discussions on a number of issues with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Seoul on Sunday, during which he “demanded” that Beijing immediately lift a ban on imports of Japanese marine products, Japanese media reported.

The ban was implemented in August last year, shortly before water from the power plant – where three reactors suffered meltdowns in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami – was released into the Pacific. Japan insists that the water has been treated and contains levels of radionuclides that are below international standards set by the IAEA.

Chinese state-run media reported that Li referred to the water as being “nuclear-contaminated”, which Tokyo disputed. Li added that the release of the water was a matter of concern for all of humanity and called on Japan to “earnestly fulfil its responsibilities and obligations”, China Central Television reported.

The two governments set up a panel of experts in January, two months after Kishida made a similar request to lift the ban on seafood imports to Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco in November. Discussions within the group have not, however, progressed smoothly.

The Yomiuri reported on Sunday that the Chinese experts had “demanded” that Japan expand its environmental assessment of areas close to the plant and provide details on levels of radiation in soil and the amount of radioactive contaminants in water before it underwent treatment.

Japan responded that it had been meeting all the requirements and standards set by the IAEA and declined the request. An effort to arrange a meeting between the two nations’ foreign ministers in earlier this month fell through as no agreement could be reached on the water issue.

A government official told the Yomiuri, “We feel no will on the Chinese side to make progress on the issue of treated water.”

Hinata-Yamaguchi said it was likely that Tokyo had considered acceding to the Chinese requests, as doing so would then leave Beijing with no “excuses” to continue to ban imports of Japanese maritime products.

“But that could easily be perceived as Japan climbing down in the face of Chinese pressure, while Tokyo is also concerned that Beijing will simply move the goalposts and come up with another reason not to comply,” he said. “And Japan also takes the position that it cannot start making exceptions for some countries.”

Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at the Tokyo campus of Temple University, agreed that both sides appeared to have backed themselves into corners that were tricky to navigate out of.

“Both sides can be criticised – and I see plenty of Chinese tourists here eating sushi with no apparent effects, but I think it will be hard to imagine they will be able to find a solution.”

With the two sides having a “long history” of arguing about history, territory and countless other issues, Kingston feared the water from the nuclear plant had already become an entrenched issue that would be used to score geopolitical points for years to come.

“The two sides are banging their heads together over this and I don’t see the head-banging coming to a halt any time soon,” he said.

Tech war: China doubles down on semiconductor self-sufficiency drive with US$47.5 billion Big Fund III

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3264296/tech-war-china-doubles-down-semiconductor-self-sufficiency-drive-us475-billion-big-fund-iii?utm_source=rss_feed

China has doubled down on efforts to achieve self-sufficiency in its semiconductor industry by creating the country’s largest-ever chip investment fund, disregarding mounting pressure from US tech sanctions and a track record of corruption in these state-led programmes.

The third phase of the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, also known as the “Big Fund”, was established last Friday with a registered capital of 344 billion yuan (US$47.5 billion), according to information made available on Monday by Chinese corporate database service Qichacha.

Big Fund III has 19 equity investors led by China’s Ministry of Finance with a 17 per cent stake, followed by the state-owned China Development Bank Capital with 10 per cent and state-asset manager Shanghai Guosheng Group with 8 per cent.

China Construction Bank on Monday said it will contribute 21.5 billion yuan over a 10-year period for a 6.25 per cent stake in the fund. Bank of China and Agricultural Bank of China also said they will invest 21.5 billion yuan each. Bank of Communications will invest 20 billion yuan for a 5.81 per cent stake, while Postal Savings Bank of China will provide 8 billion yuan for a 2.33 per cent shareholding. Other enterprises that took part in Big Fund III include Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China National Tobacco Corp.

The size of that new fund – roughly on par with the US$53 billion in incentives under the Chips and Science Act, which was enacted by US President Joe Biden in 2022 – shows the Chinese government’s “whole nation” approach to build a self-sufficient semiconductor industry and overcome Washington’s export restrictions that have handicapped the sector.

Hong Kong-listed shares of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), mainland China’s biggest contract chip maker, closed 7.43 per cent higher at HK$16.48 on Monday. Shares of the country’s No 2 chip foundry, Hua Hong Semiconductor, closed up 11.47 per cent at HK$19.82.

Launched in 2014, the Big Fund has been Beijing’s main investment vehicle to support the domestic semiconductor industry’s development, particularly in the areas of chip design, manufacturing and packaging, equipment and materials. It is a major investor in SMIC and Chinese memory chip giant Yangtze Memory Technologies Co, which are both in the US government’s trade blacklist.

The Big Fund had raised 204.1 billion yuan in 2019, up from its initial financing of 138.7 billion yuan in 2014. This programme, however, has been rocked by corruption scandals that prompted an investigation of several senior executives for “suspected serious violations of the law”.

China’s semiconductor industry, meanwhile, continues to show its strength in producing older-generation legacy chips that are widely used in cars, home appliances and various consumer electronics. China’s global share of mature semiconductor-manufacturing capacity – covering 28-nanometre and older technologies – is expected to reach 39 per cent by 2027, up from 31 per cent in 2023, according to market research firm TrendForce.

Last December, a US move to investigate American companies’ procurement of Chinese-made legacy chip triggered a backlash from Beijing, which blamed Washington for “weaponising” trade issues.

That further exacerbated geopolitical tensions amid heightened accusations from the US and Europe that China’s excess industrial capacity has strangled their own manufacturing sectors.

Despite Beijing’s efforts to bolster its domestic semiconductor industry, major manufacturers like SMIC remain largely dependent on foreign chip-making equipment, such as those from Dutch supplier ASML.

North Korea condemns China, South Korea, Japan over denuclearisation talks at summit: ‘grave political provocation’

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3264302/north-korea-condemns-china-south-korea-japan-over-denuclearisation-talks-summit-grave-political?utm_source=rss_feed

North Korea condemned China, Japan and South Korea on Monday for committing to denuclearise the Korean peninsula, describing their joint declaration after a rare summit in Seoul as a “grave political provocation” that violates its sovereignty.

The North has given notice of its plans to launch a rocket by June 4 to deploy a satellite, prompting the three countries to urge a halt to the move that would aid the isolated nation’s ability to deliver a nuclear strike.

At their first three-way summit in Seoul since 2019, the three countries sought to cooperate on security, reiterating positions on regional peace and stability and denuclearisation of the peninsula, they said in a joint statement.

Such discussion is an “insult never to be pardoned and a declaration of war against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),” however, a spokesman for North Korea’s foreign ministry said in a swift riposte.

“To discuss the denuclearisation … today constitutes a grave political provocation and sovereignty violation,” the unidentified spokesman said in the statement reported by the North’s state media.

Such a move denies the North’s inviolable sovereignty and constitution reflecting the unanimous will of all the Korean people, he added.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang did not single out North Korea for criticism, but rather called on all parties to reduce tension.

While South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida urged Pyongyang to scrap its plans to launch a second spy satellite into orbit, Li made no mention of the expected launch.

China angered North Korea when it signed on to UN Security Council resolutions sanctioning Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile programme from 2006 to 2017, but in recent years, Beijing has joined Russia in blocking new sanctions and calling for existing measures to be eased.

North Korea launched its first military spy satellite into orbit in November, after two earlier attempts failed in 2023.

Chinese state media warns AI could worsen job discrimination and break labour laws

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3264282/chinese-state-media-warn-ai-could-worsen-job-discrimination-and-break-labour-laws?utm_source=rss_feed

Chinese state media have warned that job interviews conducted by AI could worsen gender and age discrimination and violate labour laws as the country seeks to leverage the technology for its economic recovery.

The official Economic Daily on Monday called on employers to be aware of potential risks while using the technology, highlighting that artificial intelligence could have “algorithmic bias and discrimination” when evaluating candidates.

The article said that while AI could make preliminary screening of job candidates more efficient, current algorithms and standards for AI interviews could “hardly fully reflect the complexity and diversity of human behaviour”.

Personal information, such as gender, age and place of birth, might affect the assessment and worsen workplace discrimination, it said.

Government agencies should also take measures to prevent risks and investigate any violations of labour laws with the use of algorithms, it said, noting that a sound regulatory mechanism should be established to prevent the misuse of the technology.

Beijing has eyed AI as a way to spearhead the recovery of its sluggish economy and counter long-term economic challenges, including a shrinking workforce.

China has also sought strict regulatory control over the use of the technology, citing cybersecurity concerns.

AI is a frontier in the intensifying US-China rivalry in science and technology. In March, Premier Li Qiang introduced an AI+ initiative to integrate technology across traditional sectors to drive economic growth and technology upgrades.

Since late 2022, when US firm OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Chinese tech firms and start-ups have been developing their own models and competing to draw users to their generative AI services. These include Baidu’s AI chatbot Ernie Bot, which was released in March 2023 as China’s first answer to ChatGPT.

China’s labour laws state that company employment policies should not discriminate based on gender, but some employers still only recruit or show preference for men. Earlier this year, Chinese researchers found a significantly increased workplace gender gap during the pandemic.

In recent years, Chinese media reports and public debate have drawn attention to the “age 35 phenomenon”, referring to job discrimination that typically starts around that age. Experts have warned that age discrimination could have potentially serious economic consequences as the country’s population and workforce shrink.

Chinese lawmakers and political advisers have also voiced concerns about potential issues arising from the use of AI and called for effective regulation.

The Monday article noted that government agencies should pay special attention to ensure that AI interviews meet the requirements of relevant laws and regulations.

It also highlighted privacy concerns, noting the potential risk of personal data leaks related to AI interview videos and storage of these videos. The use of the technology should protect against excessive personal data collection and avoid leaks, it said.

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China property: Shanghai relaxes home buying restrictions, grants subsidies for new flats to revive sector

https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3264289/china-property-shanghai-relaxes-home-buying-restrictions-grants-subsidies-new-flats-revive-sector?utm_source=rss_feed

Shanghai, mainland China’s commercial and financial hub, will relax home purchase restrictions and grant subsidies to people buying new flats in a move designed to bolster the city’s real estate sector.

The measures come less than two weeks after the central government rolled out a rescue package to avoid a property bust in the world’s second-largest economy.

Local residents who plan to upgrade to a better property by dumping their existing flat and buying a new home in the primary market will receive a subsidy of 30,000 yuan (US$4,142.50), the Shanghai government said in a statement on Monday.

The authority will also allow more non-local residents to own a house in Shanghai.

People from other parts of mainland China who paid taxes to their local authorities for three years in a row will now be allowed to buy a flat in Shanghai. Previously they would have to have done so for to five years to qualify.

Shanghai has an inventory of new homes of about 8 million square metres, which could take more than a year to digest based on the current pace of sales, according to China Real Estate Information data.

“Chinese authorities recently unveiled a housing market support plan that shifts the focus of efforts to reducing inventories rather than solely focusing on stabilising demand,” said asset manager T. Rowe Price in an email.

“This new effort represents a significant change in policy focus, moving in the right direction.”

China has rolled out a swathe of policies to clear excess housing inventory and ensure the timely delivery of new homes, as the country embarks on its most ambitious effort yet to rescue the moribund property market and shore up the broader economy.

A raft of measures, including 300 billion yuan (US$41.5 billion) of funds for affordable housing, encouraging local authorities to buy unsold homes and ensuring developers have access to financing, were announced on May 17.

It came as Vice-Premier He Lifeng called on local governments to purchase unsold homes.

He stressed the importance of the property sector and the need to “carry on the battle” to surmount the risks that unfinished and unconstructed homes represent. The health of the property market is tied closely to social wellness and economic development, He said, according to state news agency Xinhua.

It came on the same day that the People’s Bank of China announced it would remove the national lower limit on mortgage rates for first and second homes. The PBOC also cut down-payment ratios for first- and second-time buyers to 15 and 25 per cent, respectively, compared with 20 and 30 per cent previously.

In another move to stimulate demand, the central bank lowered interest rates on loans tied to individuals’ housing provident funds by 0.25 percentage points.

The package of measures underscores the determination of policymakers to rescue the property sector, which accounts for about a quarter of the country’s economy. On April 30, the Politburo, a top decision-making body of China’s Communist Party, called on local authorities to digest existing housing inventory.

Recent official data showed that the property industry is still in a downward spiral. Prices of new homes in first-tier cities fell 0.6 per cent in April to cap an 11th straight month of decline.

Property investment dropped by 9.8 per cent year on year in the first four months of 2024.

“We think that property prices will remain under downward pressure for now. However, once the issues surrounding purchase price and sizing of unsold homes are resolved, property prices should begin to stabilise,” T. Rowe Price said.

“Even if the discounts are significant, finding a floor on prices will mark an important phase in this crisis and should gradually boost consumer confidence from its currently depressed levels.”

In Xinjiang, China’s security chief calls for ‘normalisation of counterterrorism’

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3264288/xinjiang-chinas-security-chief-calls-normalisation-counterterrorism?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s top security official Chen Wenqing has called for the “normalisation” of counterterrorism efforts in Xinjiang, where a crackdown on extremism among Uygurs and other Muslim minorities has been under way for years.

During a visit to the far western region from Wednesday to Sunday, Chen said authorities must “insist on cracking down on terrorist crimes in accordance with the law and make efforts to promote the normalisation of counterterrorism”, state news agency Xinhua reported on Sunday.

Chen is a member of the Communist Party’s elite decision-making body the Politburo, and secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, which oversees the country’s law enforcement agencies.

In Xinjiang, Chen visited the region’s capital, Urumqi, as well as Kashgar and the Kazakh prefecture of Ili. He urged local officials to “always give top priority to maintaining social stability” and to “accurately prevent and crack down on violent terrorist crimes”, according to Xinhua.

The report said Chen visited Khorgos, a town in Ili on the border with Kazakhstan, and the Tashkurgan Tajik autonomous county in the region’s southwest, which borders Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He told law enforcement officials to “strongly defend border security”.

A day after the visit, the Ministry of Public Security said in a statement on Monday that China had not seen a terrorist attack in more than seven years.

Decades of ethnic tensions and unrest in Xinjiang prompted Beijing to impose measures in 2016 that it said were aimed at cracking down on terrorist attacks. But the measures have led to allegations of widespread human rights abuses, including that at least 1 million Uygurs and other Muslim minorities were held in mass internment camps. Beijing denies the claims and has said the centres were for “vocational training”.

Xinjiang authorities have claimed an “overwhelming victory” over terrorist attacks, but security remains a major concern.

In its annual work report in January, the Xinjiang government stressed that the region would maintain a “tough stance” to safeguard social stability, meaning combating terrorism.

A white paper released by the State Council Information Office the same month praised Xinjiang’s anti-terrorism measures as improvements in China’s legal system over the past decade.

It highlighted Xinjiang’s de-radicalisation regulations, introduced in 2017 and revised in 2018, which list behaviours considered extremist by the authorities including growing an “abnormal” beard and wearing a veil.

In August, President Xi Jinping said “social stability” was a top priority for the region’s authorities when he visited Xinjiang, and he called for more efforts to combat terrorism and religious extremism, as well as stressing the need for economic development.

In recent years, the Xinjiang government has tried to improve its image by touting economic development and inviting foreign media on carefully choreographed tours to promote the region.

President Xi Jinping to welcome Arab state leaders to China, with Israel-Gaza war, Palestine and trade on the agenda

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3264299/president-xi-jinping-welcome-arab-state-leaders-china-israel-gaza-war-palestine-and-trade-agenda?utm_source=rss_feed

The Israel-Gaza war and the Palestine issue, as well as a free-trade deal between China and Gulf states, will be high on the agenda when President Xi Jinping hosts a number of Arab leaders in Beijing, observers say.

The visits mark the launch of China’s latest diplomatic charm offensive with the Arab world amid its rivalry with the United States.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, Tunisian President Kais Saied and the United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan will “pay state visits” to China from Tuesday, according to Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying on Monday.

The leaders would also attend the opening ceremony of the 10th Ministerial Conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum, Hua said.

Speaking at a briefing in Beijing on Monday morning, foreign vice-minister Deng Li said Xi would hold separate meetings with the four state leaders and “exchange views regarding bilateral ties and regional and international issues of common concern”.

The Chinese leader would also attend the opening ceremony of the conference and deliver a keynote speech on Thursday, Deng said, adding that the attendance of the four state leaders reflected “unity between China and the Arab world”.

Established two decades ago during a visit to Cairo by then president Hu Jintao, the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum is a mechanism between China and 22 members of the League of Arab States (LAS), which also includes Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Palestine, Kuwait and Qatar.

Under the mechanism, foreign ministers of the 23 countries meet every two years to discuss cooperation between China and Arab nations “in the fields of politics, economy and security”. In recent years, senior officials have also met from time to time to talk about deepening ties on energy, technology and public health.

On Monday, Deng said the foreign ministers of China and the Arab countries would “continue to have in-depth discussion of the Palestinian issue … so as to issue a common voice between China and Arab countries”.

“The goal is to end the Gaza conflict as soon as possible and realise peace, and at the same time promoting the international community’s determination to implement the ‘two-state solution’ with greater determination and more concrete actions to ultimately achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East region,” Deng said.

Beijing has long said the two-state solution – a proposed framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by establishing Israeli and Palestinian states alongside each other – would be the only way out of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The concept has been also supported by major powers the US and its allies, as well as most Arab states and the United Nations.

Fan Hongda, a professor at the Middle East Studies Institute at Shanghai International Studies University, said the ongoing Gaza crisis and the Palestinian issue would “definitely be high on the agenda”.

“But it remains to be seen what kind of substantial effect can be achieved.”

He said China might also be looking to seal a long-sought free-trade deal with the Gulf Cooperation Council when the top diplomats meet in Beijing.

The two sides started negotiations as early as 2004, with all six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council – UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman – also part of the League of Arab States.

In January, Chen Weiqing, who was then China’s top envoy to Saudi Arabia, said about 90 per cent of the terms of the free-trade negotiations between China and the Gulf Cooperation Council countries had been completed.

However, two months later, Reuters cited sources as saying talks had stalled over Saudi concerns that cheap Chinese products could compromise Riyadh’s ambitions to transform the kingdom into an industrial powerhouse.

It is the ‘Olympics’ of Chinese cuisine – and Hong Kong won gold and silver in the group categories

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/3264260/it-olympics-chinese-cuisine-and-hong-kong-won-gold-and-silver-group-categories?utm_source=rss_feed

Two Hong Kong teams took gold and silver in the group categories at the 9th World Championship of Chinese Cuisine, held in Vancouver, Canada. The teams were from Hong Kong’s Chinese Culinary Institute (CCI).

Seventy teams, from cities including Vancouver, Toronto, San Francisco, New York, Beijing and Shanghai, took part in the three-day event.

There were group and individual awards for the best cold, hot and noodle dishes, as well as for best taste, presentation and creativity.

“We’re very happy with the result,” said Leung Ho-yin, a senior instructor for Chinese cuisine at CCI. “As instructors, our happiness is not just about winning gold but watching our students make great strides. We’ve seen them start from nothing to being able to execute winning dishes.”

CCI chief instructor Terry Lau Chi-kin said team members were excited to be in Vancouver and competing at such a high level, as the other teams were made up of professional chefs.

“Each of our two teams are made of two instructors who are professional chefs, one recent CCI graduate and one current student,” he explained.

Lau added: “We choose students who are ready to compete, and each of our teams has a female chef.” One of them was Claudia Siu Hiu-ching, 24, who was excited to be in Vancouver for the first time.

“I’ve competed a few times in Asia, but this is my first time to compete at such a large-scale event. We just focused on preparing our own dishes and we practised many times before we came here,” said Siu, a teaching assistant at CCI.

Speaking before the results of the competition, held between between May 21 and 23, were announced, Lau said the two teams practised hard for almost two months and that the CCI gave the student competitors opportunities to try out their ideas.

“You may think we are at a disadvantage because we have students on our teams, but we have taken part in many local and regional competitions. We encourage our students to create new dishes in our canteen and our instructors give them feedback.”

All the teams taking part had to prepare six dishes in three hours: two appetisers – one to showcase artistic ability, the other authentic flavours – two main courses, one of which had to feature lobster, and two dim sum items.

Lau said that when the Hong Kong teams arrived in Vancouver, they hit the ground running to find the ingredients on their shopping list in half a day.

“We were concerned the (Chinese sausage) wouldn’t be good, but we didn’t have to worry,” he said with a laugh. “But we couldn’t find a yellow coloured zucchini; here, it’s mostly green. So we used them instead.”

Although Lau said the Hong Kong contingent were impressed with the quality of ingredients in Vancouver, they were hindered by only having half a day to find all their ingredients, most of which they found at a branch of T&T, a large Asian supermarket chain.

“It was a bit hard to find specific ingredients like sea urchin and we thought we could find it in a supermarket, but it turns out there is only one supplier that has it, but we didn’t have enough time to go there to get it,” he said. In the end, they did manage to get sea urchin for their dish of steamed egg with scallop.

The two teams also prepared dishes of roast beef with barbecue sauce, and typhoon shelter lobster, and for dim sum lotus-root-shaped taro puffs, and goldfish-shaped shrimp paste dumplings, that won them accolades.

The World Championship of Chinese Cuisine started in 1992 and is billed as the “Olympics” of Chinese cuisine, as it is held every four years in a different city.

Rotterdam in the Netherlands held the 8th edition of the event in 2016 before it was sidelined by the Covid-19 pandemic until this year.

The World Championship of Chinese Cuisine encourages culinary exchange between countries and chefs through forums and workshops.

Hong Kong sauce company Lee Kum Kee has been the exclusive condiment sponsor of the event three times – including this year in Vancouver – and provides all the condiments and sauces that the teams use during the competition.

Dodie Hung, the executive vice-president of corporate affairs for Lee Kum Kee, said the brand promotes Chinese culinary culture around the world by fostering a global community that shares a passion for authentic Asian flavours, and by supporting and nurturing chefs.

Is the EU de-risking for economic security or is it ‘hostile’ and anti-China?

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3264266/eu-de-risking-economic-security-or-it-hostile-and-anti-china?utm_source=rss_feed

China should not see a de-risking economic strategy by the European Union as anti-China even as the bloc mulls further tariffs on Chinese exports, a former senior Italian diplomat told a forum in Beijing on the weekend.

The sentiment is not shared by Beijing, though, with one Chinese expert calling the measures “concrete anti-China policy”.

Ferdinando Nelli Feroci, Italy’s former permanent representative to the EU, said Europe’s ties with China had grown “even more complex and complicated” compared to 2019, when the group first defined China as a partner, competitor and systemic rival.

China and the EU, he said, differed in their values and principles on issues related to domestic Chinese governance as well as Beijing’s positions on global affairs.

Feroci cited the severe economic impacts of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine as reasons for souring ties, and that the events have made Europe aware of the “risks related to excessive dependencies” and the need to improve its competitiveness.

“We realised that our economy was excessively dependent on the external for many, many important supplies. We realised that we needed to become more autonomous,” he said at a round-table discussion on Saturday as part of a forum organised by the Centre for China and Globalisation think tank.

“This brought us to adopt a number of measures that were meant to reduce our dependencies and also to improve and increase our economic security.”

Feroci, who was European Commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship in 2014, said decoupling from China was not feasible, but a de-risking approach was “much more, in a sense, reasonable”.

Last year, the EU proposed to de-risk its trade relationship with China in response to the bloc’s economic dependence on China, and what it called an “increasingly assertive” Beijing on the world stage.

The bloc in September launched an investigation into subsidies in China’s electric vehicle industry, the results of which are imminent and expected to hit Chinese-made EVs with extra import duties.

China’s overcapacity has emerged as a contentious issue in China’s deepening economic rivalry with the United States and Europe.

The US, which this month announced substantially higher tariffs on Chinese goods including EVs and solar panels, has urged the EU to join Washington in curbing cheap Chinese exports.

Still, Feroci told the forum on Saturday, the EU’s strategy was “not meant to be interpreted as anti-Chinese”, but instead it was an approach that has “a general value and global application”.

“If it has a direct impact on you, China, it is only … because China’s economy is too important and too big. And the two economies of China and Europe are so interdependent that unavoidably China risks becoming a target of these measures,” he said.

“There’s nothing particularly aggressive on our side against China. We, in Europe, want to continue to have dialogue with China.”

Fabian Zuleeg, chief executive of the Brussels-based think tank European Policy Centre (EPC), added that the bloc’s de-risking strategy was an attempt to reduce future vulnerabilities and risks which had become obvious since Russia invaded Ukraine.

“It is about reducing the ability of others and that is why it is also about open strategic autonomy,” he said. “We are trying to achieve a reasonable level of economic security. And I would just say that I don’t think this is unusual. I think a lot of the world has been doing this for a long time.”

He said it was “right” that the EU questioned whether there was a level playing field in a number of different areas.

Georg Riekeles, head of the European political economy programme at EPC, agreed, citing wind turbines as an example.

He said European producers of the turbines faced “the greatest difficulties” in getting access to the China market, raising the question of whether Chinese producers should have such unfettered access to the EU.

China, however, did not see Europe’s actions in the same way, according to Liu Zuokui, director of the Institute of World History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

He said Europe’s de-risking strategy had brought “big uncertainties” to the world and stifled cooperation, and while the bloc had said its actions were not aimed at China, “we see more and more very concrete anti-China policy”.

“It is confusing to us whether the narrative and the policy is the same,” he said, calling EU actions “hostile”.

Liu said cooperation between the EU and China over the past decades had been a “good choice”, but uncertainties from multiple factors including Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war had divided the two sides, and made being able to understand each other “very important”.

Europe’s relationship with China should also be viewed against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, Riekeles said.

“There’s war in Europe and there’s war on Europe, and that is conditioning Europe’s mindset right now,” he said.

But the biggest issue in EU-China relations was that “a third actor has inserted itself between China and the EU … And that is Russia”, he added.

Europe, Riekeles suggested, was “profoundly uncomfortable” with the growing alignment of China, Russia, and North Korea.

Feroci, the former Italian permanent representative to the EU, added that Europe was “rather disappointed” by the role China had played in the Ukraine war so far. China has not openly condemned Russia’s actions and instead appeared to have grown closer to Moscow since the invasion.

“We would have expected a much clearer stance in condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. We would have expected more solidarity in our efforts to isolate Russia, and a more proactive role in the search for a peaceful and political solution,” he said.

As cash-strapped Pakistan seeks to ease its China reliance, Saudi, UAE pledge billions

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3264255/cash-strapped-pakistan-seeks-ease-its-china-reliance-saudi-uae-pledge-billions?utm_source=rss_feed

The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have pledged to plough billions of dollars into Pakistan’s ailing economy as the Arab hierarchies “assertively expand” their influence in the region and Islamabad seeks to lessen its overreliance on Chinese funding.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif secured US$10 billion in investments from UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan during a meeting in Abu Dhabi last week.

The UAE’s deal follows China’s push on May 15 to revive investments in Pakistan under the Belt and Road Initiative, while Saudi Arabia last month said it would fast-track US$5 billion of investments in the South Asian nation as part of an estimated US$25 billion programme.

“For cash-strapped Pakistan, the commitment of the UAE and Saudi Arabia to invest in its economy comes as a welcome relief, particularly amid ongoing negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for a new bailout package,” said Farwa Aamer, director of South Asia Initiatives at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York.

Since assuming office in early March after a controversial general election, Shehbaz’s government “proactively pursued high-level engagements” with wealthy Gulf monarchies, notably Saudi Arabia and the UAE, “with a focus on fostering robust collaborations and investments across pivotal sectors”, Aamer said.

She added the strategic alignment “mirrors broader regional trends, where Gulf powers are assertively expanding their influence”, as evidenced by recent overtures towards India.

The investment came as Pakistan in July last year implemented a series of austerity measures required by the IMF under a one-year US$3 billion emergency bailout programme that helped the country avoid defaulting on its international payments.

The IMF disbursed the final US$1.1 billion tranche to Pakistan on May 1. The two sides also recently held negotiations in Islamabad for a new rescue package worth at least US$6 billion that would be extended for three to four years.

IMF mission leader Nathan Porter described the talks as “fruitful”, saying they would continue via video link over the coming days to reach an agreement ahead of the unveiling of Pakistan’s budget next month for the financial year 2024-25, which begins on July 1.

Pakistan needs foreign currency inflows totalling US$24 billion between July this year and June 2025 to service its external debts of over US$86 billion.

Porter said further discussions would cover the “financial support needed” to underpin the Pakistani authorities’ reform efforts, as called for by the IMF and Pakistan’s bilateral and multilateral partners.

He added the fiscal overhaul was aimed at “moving Pakistan from economic stabilisation to strong, inclusive and resilient growth”.

Close ally China is Pakistan’s biggest creditor and has kept it afloat by refinancing loans worth US$6.5 billion since 2022 and making US$4 billion in central-bank deposits to boost its dwindling foreign-exchange reserves.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have also parked a combined total of US$4 billion in the State Bank of Pakistan.

The two countries had tightened their terms on financial assistance to Pakistan and other profligate allies like Egypt in recent years, insisting they stick to IMF reforms and offer them viable investment opportunities.

The UAE has released US$35 billion to Egypt since February after Cairo agreed to sell it the sleepy Mediterranean coastal town of Ras al-Hikma for commercial development into a modern city and tourist resort.

“For the Gulf countries, these partnerships represent more than just gestures of goodwill; they embody an interest in consolidating their regional foothold amid intricate geopolitical dynamics,” the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Aamer said, adding the Arab states also host a significant number of Pakistani expatriates “whose contributions to their economies are duly acknowledged”.

More than 4 million Pakistanis live and work in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, sending home millions in remittances every year.

Aamer said Pakistan “could inject much-needed liquidity into key sectors of the economy” by actively seeking potential investments from Kuwait and Qatar.

She noted that it was in “Pakistan’s utmost interests” to expand its investor base and financial cushions “beyond China and the IMF reliance”.

Najam Ali, CEO of Karachi-based financial services firm Next Capital, said the “confidence” of Middle East governments and investors in Pakistan had “greatly improved” due to reforms undertaken by Islamabad since last year, pointing to the Special Investment Facilitation Council set up under the stern supervision of the country’s powerful military.

Ali said Islamabad should do a better job of identifying projects to channel their prospective investments and promptly develop them.

“Demonstrations of will by all stakeholders of all the pillars of the [Pakistani] federation” would be key, he added.

Pakistan’s business-friendly coalition government backed by parties with long-standing ties to the UAE and Saudi Arabia also influenced their investment decisions but security threats remain a concern.

Aamer said the Arab monarchies would “undoubtedly monitor closely” the deteriorating security situation in northern and western Pakistan, where several Chinese nationals have been the victims of terrorist attacks in recent years.

“Success for Pakistan will hinge on its ability to effectively address security issues, stabilise its political landscape, and implement crucial economic reforms to ensure the sustainability of these investments,” she said.

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China premier agrees on cooperation with Seoul, Tokyo but issues veiled rebuke against their US ties

https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-china-japan-trilateral-6afe4c3e280995a7fc16696edbd0a345Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, third left, holds a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang, third right, in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, May 26, 2024. (Daisuke Suzuki/Kyodo News via AP)

2024-05-27T00:20:56Z

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — China’s premier agreed Monday to revive three-way cooperation with South Korea and Japan in the face of shared challenges, but issued a veiled rebuke against the two countries’ expanding security cooperation with the United States.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang met South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Seoul in what was their countries’ first such trilateral meeting in more than four years.

Many experts say just restarting the countries’ highest-level annual meeting and agreeing on the need to improve ties is a positive sign for cooperation among the three Northeast Asian neighbors, as they all face economic uncertainties caused by wars and instability around the world. But how drastically their cooperation will be promoted is unknown as the three countries have a range of long-running complex issues.

In a joint news conference after the meeting, Li said China wants to cooperate with South Korea and Japan on economic issues, especially on supply chains and the restart of talks on a three-way free trade deal.

Yoon said the three leaders agreed to promote people-to-people and cultural exchanges, establish safe supply chain networks and work together to tackle shared environmental, health and other issues. Kishida said the three countries share a big responsibility for regional peace and that Japan will chair the next round of the trilateral leaders’ meeting.

Despite the seemingly amicable mood of the meeting, however, Li at one point expressed Chinese uneasiness about Japan and South Korea’s moves to beef up their security partnership with the U.S., which Beijing views as an attempt to form a bloc to contain China.

“We need to have honest dialogues to better enhance trust and resolve doubts. We must uphold the spirit of strategic autonomy and maintain our bilateral relations,” Li said in comments at the start of the meeting with Yoon and Kishida. “We need to promote multipolarity in the world and oppose the formation of blocs or camps.”

China is wary of Japan’s plan to purchase 400 U.S. Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles and allow repair and maintenance of U.S. warships in Japan to support their operations in the western Pacific. The expansion of military drills among South Korea, the U.S. and Japan have also drawn protests from China.

The trilateral meeting was also briefly overshadowed by North Korea’s abrupt notification to Japan of its plan to launch a satellite by early next week, an apparent bid to place its second spy satellite into orbit.

The U.N. bans any satellite launches by North Korea, viewing them as disguised tests of the country’s long-range missile technology. North Korea has said it needs spy satellites to better monitor South Korea and the U.S. and enhance the precision-attack capabilities of its missiles.

Yoon called for stern international action if North Korea goes ahead with the launch. Kishida urged North Korea to withdraw its satellite launch. But Li didn’t mention the launch plan as he offered general comments about promoting peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula through a political resolution.

South Korea, Japan and the U.S. have long urged China — North Korea’s major ally and economic pipeline — to use its leverage to persuade the North to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But China is suspected of avoiding fully implementing U.N. sanctions on North Korea and sending clandestine aid shipments to its impoverished, sociality neighbor to stay afloat and continue to serve as a bulwark against U.S. influence on the Korean Peninsula.

In a bilateral meeting with Li on Sunday, Yoon asked China to contribute to promoting peace on the Korean Peninsula, while speaking about North Korea’s nuclear program and its deepening military ties with Russia.

After meeting with Li on Sunday, Kishida also told reporters that he expressed serious concerns about the situations in the South China Sea, Hong Kong and China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. He said Japan was closely monitoring developments on self-governed Taiwan as well.

Kishida referred to China’s military assertiveness in the South China Sea, clampdowns on pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong and human rights abuses against minorities in Xinjiang. Last week, China also launched a large military exercise around Taiwan to show its anger over the inauguration of the island’s new president who refuses to accept its insistence that Taiwan is part of China.

On Monday, Li still didn’t respond directly to the outside accusations against the Chinese actions in the South China Sea or surrounding Taiwan.

“China, Japan and South Korea should appropriately handle sensitive issues and points of difference, and take care of each other’s core interests and major concerns,” Li said. “And truly construct a real multilateralism.”

The three Asian nations together represent about 25% of global gross domestic product, and they are closely linked to one another economically and culturally. But their relations have suffered on-again, off-again setbacks owing to issues stemming from Japan’s wartime aggression. China’s ambitions of greater global influence and a U.S. push to bolster its Asian alliances have also threatened to hurt ties among the three Asian countries.

The China-South Korea-Japan trilateral meeting was supposed to happen annually following their first meeting in 2008. But the sessions stalled since the last one in December 2019 in Chengdu, China because of the COVID-19 pandemic and often-complicated ties among the three countries.

Experts say the three countries all want better relations. China is the biggest trading partner for both South Korea and Japan. Analysts say China likely thinks any further strengthening of the South Korea-Japan-U.S. security ties would not serve its national interests.

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Wu reported from Bangkok. Associated Press writer Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

HUIZHONG WU China correspondent based in Taiwan twitter

Star US gene-editing scientist Zhang Feng pays rare visit to China’s top university

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3264211/star-us-gene-editing-scientist-zhang-feng-pays-rare-visit-chinas-top-university?utm_source=rss_feed

Chinese-American star scientist Zhang Feng made a rare public appearance in China last week, speaking to a packed lecture hall and meeting enthusiastic admirers at Peking University.

Zhang, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), won world renown as a pioneer of CRISPR, the gene-editing technique that lets scientists manipulate the genetic code of organisms and make precise changes to genomes.

According to the Peking University website, the 42-year-old shared details of his latest research results, as well as personal stories of his own journey into biochemistry – an interest that began in seventh grade when he saw the film Jurassic Park.

Zhang, hailed as one of the most innovative life scientists in the world, talked about the gene-editing tools and delivery systems developed in his lab at MIT, during Wednesday’s lecture which was billed as an exploration of biological diversity.

He said that the modular design of gene-based medicines offered new tools for treating genetic diseases, while the techniques to deliver these medications to their target sites in the body lags behind.

Last year, Zhang’s lab reported a new method of injecting proteins into human cells, which shows “great potential” for cancer treatments and a range of biological therapies, he said.

Zhang and his team have also developed a delivery method for RNA-based gene therapies, which use components from within human cells to self-assemble into virus-like particles and deliver functional mRNAs to mammalian cells.

According to Zhang, this method of delivering mRNAs – the single-stranded molecules involved in synthesising proteins in the body – is safer and causes fewer immune reactions compared with conventional delivery methods.

Zhang – who earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and physics from Harvard University in 2004, followed by a PhD in chemistry from Stanford University in 2009 – became a tenured professor at MIT’s Broad Institute at the age of 34.

His lab’s tools have been made widely available and are used in immunology, clinical medicine, and cancer biology, among other fields, according to Zhang’s personal webpage at MIT.

Zhang was born in Hebei province, northern China and moved to Des Moines, Iowa at the age of 11, with his computer programmer parents.

As well as his contribution to the development of CRISPR-cas9 – the revolutionary tool that allows scientists to correct a range of genetic disorders – Zhang has been a leader in optogenetics, a neuroscience technique that uses light to precisely monitor and control cells in the brain.

His numerous awards include the Alan T. Waterman Award, the Albany Medical Centre Prize, and the Canada Gairdner International Award.

Zhang is also an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors.

South China Sea: Beijing risks conflict with Philippines over ‘Monster’ ship to enforce anti-trespassing policy

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3264238/south-china-sea-beijing-risks-conflict-philippines-over-monster-ship-enforce-anti-trespassing-policy?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s deployment of its largest coastguard vessel to the South China Sea is seen by analysts as an effort to enforce its new anti-trespassing policy that could heighten the risk of conflict with the Philippines and regional tensions.

The 165-metre Chinese coastguard vessel with bow number 5901, nicknamed “The Monster”, was seen on Friday 93km (50 nautical miles) off the Scarborough Shoal, a highly contested maritime feature, accompanied by another 102-metre long coastguard ship. Beijing refers to the shoal as Huangyan Island while Manila has named it Panatag Shoal.

The location of the two vessels put them within the Philippines’ 370-kilometre wide exclusive economic zone.

In other recent disputes over the shoal, the Philippines has accused China of destroying coral reefs in the area. Beijing has dismissed Manila’s claim. Last month, Chinese coastguard ships fired water cannons at two Philippine vessels near the shoal.

Security analyst Joshua Espeña, a resident fellow and vice-president of the International Development and Security Cooperation, said Beijing had foreseen its new policy – under which the Chinese coastguard can detain foreign nationals for up to 60 days if they were caught within the maritime territory claimed by Beijing – was unfeasible without a stronger presence in the disputed waters.

“It was sent there as a gatekeeper to help enforce the law soon. It only shows there’s friction between the Philippines and China in the Panatag Shoal … like a Cold War,” Espeña told reporters on Saturday during an interview.

When asked about possible scenarios should China proceed with its new policy, Espeña said the Philippines would be forced to resist arrests seen as acts of aggression.

“The Marcos government is urged to strongly communicate this to the Chinese side to dissuade any untoward incidents such as this. As Marcos mentioned in an interview during his working visit to Australia, the regional conflict might be triggered because of miscalculations.

“But it is also telling that Beijing is forcing Manila’s hand into this dangerous scenario by decisively calculating that arrests will make them achieve their objectives overnight,” Espeña told This Week in Asia in a separate interview.

“We can imagine a tit-for-tat scenario from mere arrest to a deadly stand-off into a limited regional conflict as the Philippine security forces seek to rescue Filipino fishers in any case. This will be followed by China’s entry of the People’s Liberation Army Navy vessels to dissuade the Philippines from making further moves. This inevitably would involve the Philippine armed forces entering into a scene,” he added.

In 2012, the Chinese seized Scarborough Shoal, the traditional fishing ground of Filipino fishermen within the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of the Philippines, after a two-month stand-off with the Philippine Navy.

“If that is so, Beijing will worsen the situation by placing bigger and more sophisticated toys at sea. At that point, Manila is likely consulting its American counterparts that already have a minimum presence via EDCA bases,” said Espeña, referring to the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement, a pact with the United States to hold large-scale joint military exercises on Philippine soil.

“All parts of the country will be put on a high alert, which means bringing in more US forces to strike against Chinese targets. The Chinese will of course upscale its activities but it also risks the US bringing everything to the table,” he added.

In such a scenario, the Philippines must communicate to its allies and other parties its efforts to deter China, Espeña said.

“However, such deterrence rests on credibility, which then rests on capability. The Philippines has little room to manoeuvre except to communicate to its allies that communicating doomsday is a lesser evil than appeasement. Of course, this move must be calculated,” Espeña explained.

Jay Batongbacal, director of the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea, said China’s threat to arrest and detain Filipino fishermen within the country’s EEZ would be illegal and invalid.

On Sunday, the Department of Foreign Affairs expressed “serious concern” over China’s new policy.

The agency pointed out that every sovereign state had the right to formulate and enact laws, as well as enforce domestic legislation within its jurisdiction but the laws “may not be applied in the territory, maritime zones or jurisdiction of other states, nor violate other sovereign states’ rights and entitlements under international law”.

“The regulations are issued on the basis of the 2021 coastguard law, which also illegally expanded the maritime law enforcement powers of China’s coastguard,” the agency’s statement read.

“China would be in direct violation of international law should it enforce these new regulations in the waters and maritime features within the illegal, null and void, and expansive 10-dash line, which would effectively cover areas of the West Philippine Sea where the Philippines has sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction, or in the high seas.”

The agency said China’s legislation must reflect and abide by its commitments and obligations under international law, particularly the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), the binding 2016 Arbitral Award on the South China Sea, and the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.

On Friday, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr’s defence chief slammed Beijing’s anti-trespassing policy against Filipino fishermen.

Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jnr described China’s new rule as “provocative” as it encroached on the West Philippine Sea, disregarding the Philippines’ sovereign rights and those of other claimant countries in the Spratly Islands. The West Philippine Sea is Manila’s name for part of the South China Sea within its exclusive economic zone.

Speaking at the 126th anniversary of the Philippine Navy headquarters in Manila, Teodoro said China’s measure was a provocation and violation of Unclos. “What we do in our exclusive economic zone as to how we defend it can in no way be termed by any sane person as a provocation.”

Unclos refers to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which established Itlos, an independent judicial body. According to its website, the 21-member tribunal is tasked with deciding maritime disputes concerning the interpretation or application of the convention, including “the delimitation of maritime zones”.

Teodoro said: “It is roguish and irresponsible [the] threat to detain, quote and unquote, ‘trespassers’ in what is claimed as internal waters but is actually part of the high seas and part of the West Philippine Sea.”

Commodore Roy Vincent Trinidad, the Navy spokesman for the West Philippine Sea, has also accused China of intrusion in the country’s territorial waters.

Trinidad told reporters: “There will be an appropriate response from the National Task Force on WPS. It’s up to the task force to decide which course of action to take next.”

Victims of Indonesia’s anti-Chinese riots cling to hope for justice as painful memories fester

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3264183/victims-indonesias-anti-chinese-riots-cling-hope-justice-painful-memories-fester?utm_source=rss_feed

Magdalena Martina Wulandari was aged 5 when she lost her brother Stevanus to Indonesia’s bloody riots in May 1998.

Stevanus was 16 at the time, and like many Indonesian youngsters, loved playing football and listening to music with his friends. He was also a curious teenager, so when he heard that there was some trouble at a nearby shopping centre in East Jakarta, he rushed to take a look.

But Stevanus didn’t return. He was killed in a fire that broke out at the City Plaza Klender mall, an incident that would claim the lives of hundreds of people.

Now 31, Magdalena has followed in her mother Maria Sanu’s footsteps trying to “learn the truth behind the cases of the tragic events and the human rights violations” that changed the course of their lives.

“We have struggled for the past 26 years with the families of other victims to learn the truth … and to get justice,” Magdalena told This Week in Asia.

Pent-up anger towards military dictator Suharto’s 32-year rule and an economic downturn triggered by the Asian financial crisis saw Indonesians take to the streets in violent protests against food shortages, mass unemployment and corruption.

The country’s minority Chinese community – seen as disproportionately wealthy and blamed for stealing jobs – became prime targets of the rioters, who attacked homes and businesses owned by ethnic Chinese.

Another major flashpoint for the rampage and Suharto’s resignation was the killing of four students by security forces at a protest in Jakarta’s Trisakti University. An investigation into the incident was opened, but nobody had been charged for the shootings.

Victims, their families and activists commemorated the 26th anniversary of the riots and the Trisakti tragedy earlier this month as they continued to press for accountability from the government.

But there are fears their calls for justice will be sidelined under Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto, who was a military general in Suharto’s regime and married to his daughter.

While Prabowo has denied accusations that he helped instigate the riots, he earlier admitted his role in the kidnapping of student democracy activists in 1998, which led to his dismissal from the army.

Indonesian author and leading feminist Julia Suryakusuma described the incoming leader, who takes office in October, as a “blatant symbol and representation of the lack of recognition of human rights issues in Indonesia”.

“So far he has not taken any responsibility, so there’s no reason to think he will do anything different,” she said.

Jane Rosalina Rumpia, head of the Impunity Monitoring Division at the Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (Kontras), said at least 1,190 people were killed in the riots that incumbent President Joko Widodo has called “gross human rights violations”.

He apologised last year for the violence and offered non-judicial settlements to the victims’ families.

Jane said concrete legal and state accountability measures must follow Widodo’s “acknowledgement and regret” so that the perpetrators of the killings are finally brought to light.

“The victims and their families have had to endure mental and physical torment due to the lack of accountability of the state to provide effective recovery by upholding the rule of law,” she said.

Data from Indonesia’s National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) showed that 85 women, mostly Chinese, were reportedly raped. But the real number is believed to be far higher because many victims did not come forward, Kontras’ Jane said.

Suryakusuma said women bore the brunt of the atrocities due to widespread public discontent with the Chinese tycoons and large business groups that thrived under Suharto’s administration.

“The mostly wealthy Chinese and their conglomerates were seen as the cronies of the Suharto regime, but the anger of the people could not be targeted at the conglomerates, so they went after the most vulnerable members of the Chinese community, the women,” she said.

The bloodshed prompted Indonesia to establish Komnas Perempuan, which organises campaigns every year to keep the public memory of the riots alive and “ensure that the events of 1998 do not happen again”.

Veryanto Sitohang, a commissioner for the agency, acknowledged that the outreach efforts may fall on deaf ears at government level despite most victims and their families still waiting for a judicial settlement.

“We suspect that this has not been done because the actors involved in the May 1998 riots are currently in power circles,” he said.

But activists have not lost hope, Suryakusuma said. Every Thursday afternoon since 2007, a group of volunteers dressed in black stand in front of Jakarta’s State Palace in silent protest to demand justice for their lost loved ones.

“This is a very visible sign that there is a demand that these past human rights issues be recognised, even though it has not been addressed for so long,” she said.

Faiz Nabawi, the president of the student executive body at Trisakti University, said that students commemorate the campus shootings through community events and educational discussions aimed at ensuring the next generation understands this pivotal chapter in their school’s history.

“The spirit of the students remains undimmed in pushing for change for the better,” he said, urging students to uphold the ideals of Indonesia’s Reformasi movement that led to major democratic changes in the country.

Meanwhile, Magdalena vowed to carry on with her 78-year-old mother’s long-standing efforts to secure justice for the death of Stevanus and all the other families who lost loved ones during the riots.

“As the next generation, I will continue to fight so that the truth about cases of past human rights violations is revealed,” she said.

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Philippines split over divorce bill, rail travel in Malaysia, the women who painted China: 5 weekend reads you missed

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3264197/philippines-split-over-divorce-bill-rail-travel-malaysia-women-who-painted-china-5-weekend-reads-you?utm_source=rss_feed

We have put together stories from our coverage last weekend to help you stay informed about news across Asia and beyond. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider .

Chinese ships spotted near disputed East China Sea islets every day this year, Japan says

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3264220/chinese-ships-spotted-near-disputed-east-china-sea-islets-every-day-year-japan-says?utm_source=rss_feed

Japan has spotted Chinese ships sailing near disputed islands in the East China Sea for a record 158 consecutive days, Tokyo’s top government spokesman said on Monday.

The territorial dispute over the Tokyo-controlled Diayou Islands, known in Japan as the Senkakus, is a long-running sore point between the countries.

Relations deteriorated in 2012 when Tokyo “nationalised” some of these remote islands, and Japanese officials regularly protest against the presence of Chinese coastguard and other vessels in the surrounding waters.

On Monday, Japan’s coastguard observed four China Maritime Police Bureau vessels sailing in the “contiguous” zone adjacent to Japan’s territorial sea near the island chain.

Contiguous waters are a 12-nautical-mile band that extends beyond territorial waters.

It was the 158th consecutive day that Chinese vessels were spotted there – surpassing the previous record of 157 days in 2021, top government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi said. That means Japan has spotted Chinese ships near the islets every day since December 21 last year.

“The government considers this series of navigations within the contiguous zone and intrusions into territorial waters an extremely serious matter,” he told reporters.

Hayashi said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had expressed concern over the issue at a bilateral meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Seoul on Sunday.

Kishida is in the South Korean capital for the first trilateral summit with Li and President Yoon Suk-yeol in nearly five years. It was held on Monday morning.

In April, Beijing lodged a protest with Tokyo after a group of Japanese lawmakers visited the disputed isles, a trip the Chinese embassy denounced as “provocative”.

After years of negotiations, the two countries have set up a military hotline to avert unexpected clashes in the East China Sea, with the first call held a year ago.

‘No limits’ partnership or ‘priority partners’: China, Russia seek to define relationship as Western pressure mounts

https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3264198/no-limits-partnership-or-priority-partners-china-russia-seek-define-relationship-western-pressure?utm_source=rss_feed

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When Chinese President Xi Jinping hugged his “old friend” Vladimir Putin as he escorted his visiting Russian counterpart out of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing last week, it again laid bare the closeness between the two countries.

However, despite the solidarity showcased during the Russian president’s second trip to China in just seven months, a question mark remains over how far the “no limits” friendship between the world’s two biggest non-Western powers can go.

Observers foresee increasing tests for the alignment, and they expect Beijing to seek a “delicate balance” in its diplomacy with the Kremlin and the West.

The view comes as the United States and the European Union have raised the tone of their warnings about China’s alleged support for Russia’s defence industrial base amid the war in Ukraine, while Beijing has ramped up efforts – notably Xi’s recent European tour – to put its relations with Washington and Brussels on better footing.

Putin concluded his two-day trip to China with a stop in Harbin, a northeastern Chinese city known for its Russian legacy and its role as an important gateway between the two countries.

It marked the Russian leader’s first trip abroad since starting his fifth term in office earlier this month. Xi had likewise chosen Moscow as the destination of his first overseas trip in March last year after beginning a norm-breaking third term as China’s president.

Such reciprocity has shed light on the symbolic value of Putin’s latest visit, which extended his personal bond with Xi.

The pair have met 43 times since 2013, and they are expected to meet again in Kazakhstan in July.

In Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang – the northernmost Chinese province sharing a 3,045km (1,892-mile) border with Russia – Putin called for stronger bilateral trade and increased Chinese investment in Russia’s far east, a key region in his “pivot to the East” strategy to counter economic pressure from the West.

In sharp contrast to itineraries of other foreign dignitaries, the Russian leader also visited the Harbin Institute of Technology, one of China’s top defence-research universities, which has a deep link to the Chinese military, in a sign of expanding security ties between the two nuclear powers.

Just one day earlier, Beijing and Moscow said in a statement issued after talks between Xi and Putin that the two sides would expand their joint drills; conduct regular joint maritime and air patrols; and work together on space programmes.

In the wide-ranging document – of which the official Chinese version had more than 12,000 characters, or more than a third longer than one issued during Xi’s visit to Russia last year – the leaders reaffirmed that each country was the other’s “priority partner”.

They once again lashed out at Washington, blaming the US for sticking to a cold war mentality and trying to undermine regional stability to maintain its “absolute military superiority”.

On the same day, a top Pentagon official expressed “serious concern” to a counterpart in Beijing about the country’s increasing military cooperation with Moscow, during a video call.

That followed sanctions on 20 Hong Kong and mainland Chinese companies, imposed by the US government earlier this month for their alleged roles in the development of Russian energy production and advanced manufacturing.

Before that, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had labelled China “the top supplier” of dual-use items that Moscow is utilising to fuel its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and he warned of “additional measures” on Chinese entities when visiting the country last month.

“I made it clear that if China does not address this problem, we will,” Blinken said in Beijing after a meeting with Xi.

Still, Chinese authorities have repeatedly pushed back against American criticism and said it would “resolutely defend” its “inviolable” rights to have “normal economic and trade exchanges” with Russia.

In the joint statement last week to deepen their strategic partnership that coincided with the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations, Beijing and Moscow vowed to build even closer cooperation in their energy and finance sectors.

Russia grew to become China’s fourth-largest trading partner in 2023, overtaking Germany and Australia, while China had been Russia’s largest trading partner for 14 consecutive years.

A top US intelligence official said in March that Russia was increasingly dependent on China, North Korea and Iran as the war in Ukraine strains resources.

Xi had renewed China’s call for a “political settlement” to the war in Ukraine as he rolled out the red carpet for Putin last week.

Putin characterised his talks with Xi as “very substantive” and said they spent “virtually the entire day” together.

His recent trip to China came as Russian forces were advancing around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and shortly after Putin had reshuffled his cabinet – including naming a civilian economist as his surprise new defence minister – ahead of an expected summer offensive in Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had warned last week that Russia could intensify its offensive and urged China to attend a June peace summit in Switzerland.

Beijing’s ties with Moscow had also been in sharp focus when Xi travelled to France, Serbia and Hungary – his first trip to Europe in more than five years.

Kyiv and several Western capitals had called on China to use its “influence on Russia” to help stop the war.

A quasi-alliance with Russia might become a countervailing force against Washington and its allies, but it could also stand in the way of China easing tensions with two of its largest trading partners as the world’s second-largest economy is trying to restore foreign investors’ sentiment.

Facing the dilemma, Beijing has been expected to strike a balance between maintaining its strategic ties with Moscow and avoiding confrontation with the West amid threats of fresh US sanctions.

Neither the joint statement in March last year nor the one this month used the phrase “no limits” to describe the relationship between China and Russia.

A report released two weeks ago by a Beijing-based think tank suggested that about 80 per cent of payment settlements between China and Russia had been suspended as of March because of sanctions from the West.

China’s banks are also applying more scrutiny to transactions traceable to Moscow, or not processing them at all, amid growing pressure to distance themselves from Russia.

China’s exports to Russia fell by nearly 14 per cent from a year earlier in April, down for the second straight month.

Some Chinese scholars have also cautioned about risks posed by Moscow – rather than Western pressure – including potential moves to “muddy water” in Northeast Asia with deeper interactions with Pyongyang.

60-Second Catch-up

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin to meet again in July to build on Beijing visit: Lavrov.

‘Priority partners’: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin hit out at US in China-Russia show of solidarity.

Video: Xi welcomes ‘old friend’ Putin to Beijing, affirms strength of China-Russia bond.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin pledge to develop even closer China-Russia ties in energy and finance.

Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping agree to expand Russia-China military coordination.

Opinion: Putin’s China visit confirms West’s worst fears about emerging Beijing-Moscow axis.

Vladimir Putin in push for stronger trade ties during visit to China’s northeast.

Video: Russia’s Vladimir Putin visits China’s ‘little Moscow’ Harbin as part of state visit.

Deep dives

China’s expanding relations with Russia will be put to the test when Vladimir Putin makes an official visit this week, as Beijing tries to keep Moscow close while avoiding Western sanctions over the Ukraine war.

The Russian president will arrive in Beijing on Thursday for a two-day trip that is expected to be a show of the neighbours’ growing geostrategic alignment and the “deep friendship” of Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. But analysts say it could also reveal the limits of China-Russia ties.

Read more.

During his state visit to China – set for later this month – Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to broach an important subject with his counterpart, Xi Jinping: the Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline, a project that appears to have stalled.

The natural gas pipeline, designed to connect Russia and China via Mongolia, is a signature project symbolising the “no-limits” strategic partnership between Beijing and Moscow. If completed, it would divert 50 billion cubic metres (1.8 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas per year to north China, redirecting a supply that once went to Europe.

Read more.

China and Russia should explore using their own platforms – and could tap obscure banks – to settle payments while strengthening ties in the Russian far east, if the neighbours want to get around Western economic sanctions over Moscow’s war in Ukraine, a Chinese research organisation says.

Smaller Chinese banks could be “promoted” for trade with Russia, while setting up new financial institutions could help “circumvent Western sanctions”, according to a May 11 report by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at the Beijing-based Renmin University.

Read more.

Two senior members of US President Joe Biden’s administration discussed on Tuesday cooperation with the European Union on countering Beijing, using additional sanctions to stymie Russia’s war against Ukraine and tariffs to deal with Chinese overcapacity.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the administration would work with the EU to sanction Chinese companies supplying Russia with microelectronics and hi-tech products that support Moscow’s defence industry.

Read more.

A top Pentagon official warned a counterpart in Beijing on Thursday about its increasing cooperation with Moscow, even as Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin were pledging closer economic and military ties.

The US Defence Department said that Ely Ratner, its assistant secretary for Indo-Pacific security, had expressed “serious concern” over the ties during a video link with Major General Li Bin, the director of China’s Central Military Commission office for International Military Cooperation.

Read more.

China renewed its call for a “political settlement” to the war in Ukraine on Thursday as Beijing pulled out all the stops to welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin on the first international trip of his new term.

“Both sides agree that a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis is the correct direction,” Chinese President Xi Jinping said after talks with Putin at the Great Hall of the People.

Read more.

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Outspoken head of China’s foreign ministry press corps, Hua Chunying, promoted to deputy foreign minister

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3264229/outspoken-head-chinas-foreign-ministry-press-corps-hua-chunying-promoted-deputy-foreign-minister?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s outspoken diplomat Hua Chunying, who has been heading the foreign ministry’s press department, has been promoted to deputy foreign minister, Beijing announced on Monday.

After her promotion Hua, 54, who has been a foreign ministry spokesperson since President Xi Jinping started his first term in 2012, is the youngest of the five deputy foreign ministers and the only female among them.

She was promoted to assistant foreign minister and the director general of the ministry’s press department in 2021. According to the foreign ministry website, she still leads the press department, although it is not clear whether she will retain this position following her promotion.

Hua is seen to embody China’s Wolf Warrior diplomacy, particularly in light of her comments during the Covid-19 pandemic, including calling on the US to open up its lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, for investigation while the administration of then US president Donald Trump accused a lab in Wuhan, China of being the origin of the virus.

Hua joined X, formerly known as Twitter, in 2020 as part of Beijing’s wider push to put forth its own narrative, and has around 2.5 million followers on the platform.

On X, she often blasts Western officials over their accusations and criticism against China. In 2020, she exchanged a series of tweets with then-US State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, rebuking the American’s criticism that China’s Covid-19 policies lacked transparency.

As US-China relations have worsened in recent years, Hua has often been seen attacking US policies, including over the Israel-Gaza war. Last month, she posted several photos and video screenshots criticising what appeared to be a US police crackdown on large-scale campus protests against US support for Israel.

In one post that appeared to show video of police arrests, she asked, “remember how US officials reacted when these protests happened elsewhere”.

She has often accused the US of having a “double standard”, comparing the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, with the storming of Legislative Council in Hong Kong in 2019 – and questioning why the US called the protesters on Capitol Hill “rioters” but those in Hong Kong were deemed “democratic heroes”.

She has also accused the US of using the alleged “overcapacity” issue as “a new narrative trap against” China, as Washington and its allies ramp up measures in targeting “excessive” Chinese products they say are flooding the global market.

Hua joined the foreign ministry in 1992 and had held several diplomatic roles, serving as counsellor in the department of European affairs in 2010. Her overseas stints included a significant term at the Chinese Mission to the European Union in Brussels.

She is married with one daughter.

China has threatened trade with some countries after feuds. They’re calling ‘the firm’ for help

https://apnews.com/article/china-trade-economic-firm-state-department-42655e067386a20b22f1317ce298f334FILE - Lithuanian and European Union flags fly outside the Lithuanian Embassy in Beijing, Dec. 16, 2021. The U.S. State Department has set up an eight-person team known as the "firm" to provide help to countries cut off from Chinese trade. The team emerged after Washington stepped in to help Lithuania when the northern European country found its cargo shipments to and from China stranded two years ago during a feud over Taiwan. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

2024-05-27T04:06:47Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — Business is good at “the firm.”

The eight-person team at the State Department is leading Washington’s efforts to ease the economic blowback for countries targeted by China.

It emerged in the scramble to help Lithuania during a spat with China over Taiwan two years ago. Today, “the firm” is helping growing numbers of nations cope with what diplomats call economic coercion from Beijing.

Countries “knock on the door, they call,” Undersecretary of State Jose Fernandez told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “We run a consulting firm that does not have to advertise for clients, as they come.”

Led by State Department senior adviser Melanie Hart, the group reviews vulnerabilities and develops responses for countries that are cut off or fear losing trade with global powerhouse China. Since the group’s launch with Lithuania, more than a dozen countries have approached the Biden administration for assistance, Fernandez said.

The effort comes as Washington is stepping up its campaign to push back at China’s global influence and tensions grow between the rivals.

The Chinese Embassy in Washington took issue with the notion that Beijing is using economic pressure on other countries, calling it “completely unfounded.” The United States, it said, was the one bullying China economically by abusing export controls, treating Chinese companies unfairly and labeling Beijing as a perpetrator of economic coercion.

Fernandez said that is a tactic China “is using over and over. They believe that intimidation works. That’s why we got into the act. The time had come to stop this thing.”

For example, when a Norwegian committee in 2010 awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident, Beijing stopped buying salmon from the Nordic country. Two years later, China rejected banana imports from the Philippines over a territorial dispute in the South China Sea. In 2020, Beijing responded to Australia’s call for an investigation into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic by raising tariffs on Australian barley and wines.

Then came Lithuania. In late 2021 and early 2022, Lithuanian businesses saw their cargo shipments to and from China stranded, and they were warned by major European businesses that Lithuanian-made auto parts would be barred from products for the Chinese market.

That came after Lithuania allowed Taiwan’s de-facto embassy in Vilnius to bear the name Taiwan, instead of Taipei — Taiwan’s capital city — as preferred by Beijing. China considers the self-governed island to be part of Chinese territory and protested the use of Taiwan.

Instead of caving in, the northern European country asked for help. The U.S. and its allies stepped up.

American diplomats sought new markets for Lithuanian goods. The Export-Import Bank in Washington provided Vilnius with $600 million in export credit, and the Pentagon signed a procurement agreement with the country.

And “the firm” kept at it. The State Department works as the first line of response and can coordinate with other U.S. agencies to reach “every tool that the U.S. government has,” according to a department official who asked not to be named to discuss details of the team.

While it takes years to reorient global supply chains to reduce reliance on countries such as China, the team tries to offer a quicker way to ease a crisis, the official said, comparing the team to ambulance services that “help you get past that scary emergency time.”

For example, the U.S. might try to work with partners to help a country quickly divert agricultural products to new markets, build more cold storage so products can reach farther markets or improve product quality to gain entry into more markets, the official said.

The assistance is confidential, the official said, declining to discuss the tools at the team’s disposal or name the countries that have sought help.

Shay Wester, director of Asian economic affairs at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said it was “a significant and much-needed initiative.”

“China’s growing use of economic coercion to pressure countries over political disputes is a significant challenge that requires a concerted response,” said Wester, who co-authored an April report on the issue.

The responses from other countries show that demand is high for this kind of support, Wester said.

This month, Lithuania hosted a conference on resisting economic pressure, and Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said the aim of that action “is to crush the victims by forcing reversal and public renunciation of its policies.”

Liu Pengyu, the Chinese Embassy spokesman, said the problem with Lithuania was “a political not an economic one. They were caused by Lithuania’s acts in bad faith that hurt China’s interests, not China’s pressure on Lithuania.”

Fernandez, who attended the conference, applauded Lithuania for standing up to China. “Lithuania gave us the opportunity to prove that there were alternatives to the coercion,” he said.

Chinese scientists report world first as they cure patient’s diabetes with cell therapy

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3263878/chinese-scientists-report-world-first-they-cure-patients-diabetes-cell-therapy?utm_source=rss_feed

For patients battling diabetes, a group of Chinese scientists and clinicians may offer a glimmer of hope. For the first time in the world, a patient’s diabetes has reportedly been cured using cell therapy.

The patient, a 59-year-old man who had been living with type 2 diabetes for 25 years, was at serious risk of complications from the disease. He had a kidney transplant in 2017, but had lost most of his pancreatic islet function which controls blood glucose levels, and relied on multiple insulin injections every day.

“He was at great risk of serious diabetes complications,” Yin Hao, a leading researcher at Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, told Shanghai-based news outlet The Paper earlier this month.

The patient received the innovative cell transplant in July 2021. Eleven weeks after the transplant, he was free of the need for external insulin, and the dose of oral medication to control blood sugar levels was gradually reduced and completely stopped one year later.

“Follow-up examinations showed that the patient’s pancreatic islet function was effectively restored,” Yin said. The patient has now been completely weaned off insulin for 33 months.

The medical breakthrough, achieved by a team of doctors and researchers from institutions including Shanghai Changzheng Hospital, the Centre for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Renji Hospital, all based in Shanghai, was published in the journal Cell Discovery on April 30.

“I think this study represents an important advance in the field of cell therapy for diabetes,” said Timothy Kieffer, a professor in the Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Diabetes is a chronic condition that affects the way our bodies convert food into energy.

What we consume is broken down into glucose (a simple sugar) and released into the bloodstream. Insulin, produced by the islets of the pancreas, is essential for regulating blood sugar levels.

In diabetes, this system is hijacked: either the body does not produce enough insulin, or it cannot use the insulin it produces effectively.

There are several types of diabetes, of which type 2 is the most common, affecting almost 90 per cent of sufferers. It is largely diet-related and develops over time.

Regardless of the type of diabetes, failure to maintain normal blood glucose levels over time can lead to serious side effects, including heart disease, vision loss and kidney disease.

According to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, “there isn’t a cure yet for diabetes”.

Along with losing weight, eating well and taking pills, insulin is the current mainstay of treatment for some, but this requires frequent injections and monitoring.

Scientists around the world are researching islet transplant as a promising alternative, primarily by creating islet-like cells from human stem cell cultures. Now, after more than a decade of work, the group of Chinese scientists has come a step closer.

The team used and programmed the patient’s own peripheral blood mononuclear cells, Yin said, which were then transformed into “seed cells” and reconstituted pancreatic islet tissue in an artificial environment.

While preclinical data from Kieffer’s team supports the use of stem cell-derived islets for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, the report by Yin and colleagues is, to Kieffer’s knowledge, “the first evidence in humans”.

Yin said the breakthrough is another step forward in the relatively new field of regenerative medicine – where the body’s own regenerative capabilities are harnessed to treat illness.

“Our technology has matured and it has pushed boundaries in the field of regenerative medicine for the treatment of diabetes.”

Globally, China has the highest number of people with diabetes. According to the International Diabetes Federation, there are 140 million people with diabetes in the country. Of those, about 40 million depend on lifelong insulin injections.

China’s diabetic population is disproportionately high, according to Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In an article last year, he pointed out that while China accounted for 17.7 per cent of the world’s population, the country’s diabetic population made up a staggering quarter of the global total, placing a huge health burden on the government.

If this approach for cell therapy ultimately works, Kieffer said, “it can free patients from the burden of chronic medications, improve health and quality of life, and reduce healthcare expenditures”.

But to get there, he added, studies in more patients based on the findings of this Chinese study are needed.

AIA eyes more property assets in mainland China to house operations as insurance business charts strong growth

https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/3264196/aia-eyes-more-property-assets-mainland-china-house-operations-insurance-business-charts-strong?utm_source=rss_feed

AIA Group, Asia’s biggest publicly traded insurer, is looking to own more properties in mainland China to consolidate its operations, picking an opportune time when a two-year slump has rendered asset prices “affordable” to long-term investors.

The insurer will be looking to own premium office buildings in key growth cities like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, after an economic slowdown that started in 2022 led to a spike in vacancy rates in commercial properties last year. The plan will add to its recent acquisitions in Shanghai.

“Property prices are affordable and we have strong cash flow, which enables us to invest in office buildings for our own use,” chairman Edmund Tse Sze-wing said at a media briefing in Hong Kong. “China is one of our major markets, we are not short-term investors.”

AIA took five years to redevelop its headquarters in Hong Kong, turning the 50-year old building in Wan Chai into a modern structure to prevent wastage and keep up with new environmental and energy demands. The insurer will unveil its new-look tower on 1 Stubbs Road on Monday.

AIA paid 2.4 billion yuan (US$337.5 million) in January to acquire a 95 per cent share in the Capital Square Beijing building in Chaoyang district. It followed the purchase of a 90 per cent share in a commercial complex in Shanghai’s North Bund, now renamed AIA Financial Centre, for 5 billion yuan in December 2022.

Savills forecasts vacancy rates in grade A offices to increase in 10 major mainland cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hangzhou, with most of them experiencing excess supply. China’s office-market cycle, which typically lasts for four to six years, remains shaky since prices fell from 2022, the property consultancy said in a report in January.

Tse, 86, led AIA’s return to mainland China in 1992, by becoming the first foreign insurer with a licence to operate onshore. The insurer was established in Shanghai in 1919 and left the mainland market after 1949.

Having its own building in Hong Kong to house some 1,800 staff under one roof will help AIA better control costs, Tse said. The building will incorporate the latest technology and allow the firm to “train and nurture a new generation of insurance leaders”, he added.

AIA reported a 31 per cent jump in value of new business to US$1.33 billion in the first three months of 2024, the best quarter in its operating history. The yardstick is an indicator of its growth trajectory.

Hong Kong and mainland China now account for more than 50 per cent of AIA Group’s new business value in 18 markets. Tse believes these two markets will continue to be a growth engine for AIA.

“There have been a lot of ups and downs in the insurance market in Hong Kong over the past 50 years, but Hong Kong remains resilient,” he said. “With policy support from the central government, the insurance industry in Hong Kong will continue to prosper.”

CEO Lee Yuan Siong said the reopening of its headquarters is a milestone in AIA’s 90 years of business in the city.

“The new building will use all the environmentally friendly design features to cut down waste and use of energy,” said Mark Konyn, AIA group chief investment officer. “It is equipped with a gym and indoor running track ... creating an environment for the staff to enjoy and develop their career.”

Climate change: Hong Kong, mainland China firms trail regional peers for credibility of emissions targets, MSCI study finds

https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/3264018/climate-change-hong-kong-mainland-china-firms-trail-regional-peers-credibility-emissions-targets?utm_source=rss_feed

Hong Kong and mainland China’s big listed companies have underperformed their peers in the Asia-Pacific region when it comes to the credibility of their environmental targets and disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions attributed to supply chain partners, according to new research.

Only 1 per cent of 70 large-cap Hong Kong-listed firms that are included in the MSCI AC Asia-Pacific IMI index have set greenhouse gas reduction targets considered “fully” credible, according to a report by MSCI ESG Research, the environment, social and governance research unit of index provider MSCI. The regional gauge covers 4,242 constituents across 13 markets.

This trails 2 per cent to 22 per cent of large-cap constituents in the rest of the region besides mainland China and New Zealand.

Some 29 per cent of Hong Kong’s large-cap firms have “less than fully” credible goals, trailing a range of 33 to 86 per cent of companies listed in other countries in the region, except mainland China’s 6 per cent.

This is partly due to a lower propensity among the Hong Kong firms to have third party verification of whether their climate targets are aligned with global climate ambitions, said Wang Xiaoshu, MSCI ESG Research’s head of Asia-Pacific ESG and climate research.

“It is very easy for companies to commit to net zero by 2050 or 2060, but it is really too long a time frame,” she said in an interview. “What we need from companies to demonstrate credibility is shorter term targets like 2030 or earlier, a track record in meeting prior targets, besides verification by third parties such as the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).”

MSCI ESG Research uses a decarbonisation target credibility weighting system. To be considered “fully credible”, a company must have at least one short-term target, at least one externally-validated target, a track record of achieving previous targets and be on course to meet some targets.

Having credible corporate reduction targets is key for achieving the ambitions of most nations in the region to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, or 2070 at the latest. Last year, the Asia-Pacific region contributed 40 per cent of global emissions.

Excessive emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for climate change and a higher frequency of extreme weather events across the world, according to scientists.

Climate change has resulted in growing food insecurity, population displacement, biodiversity loss and productivity losses, which in turn threaten the stability of corporate supply chains. Asia-Pacific is particularly exposed to climate risks.

If the world warms up by 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century from pre-industrial times, the potential losses suffered by the 4,242 companies that make up the MSCI AC Asia-Pacific Investable Market Index due to extreme climate events could amount to a 10th of their enterprise value, MSCI estimated. That compares with an estimated 4 per cent for the 5,595 constituent stocks of the MSCI World IMI index.

The MSCI study found that disclosure rates for so-called scope 3 emissions – attributable to supply chain partners – among small and mid-cap firms lagged behind their larger peers by over 25 percentage points across the region, except in Hong Kong and mainland China.

In Hong Kong, the small and mid-cap disclosure rate of 36 per cent was better than peers in other regional markets except for the 60 per cent in New Zealand where disclosure is mandatory. However, Hong Kong’s large-caps firms have a scope 3 reporting rate of 41 per cent, below the range of 53 to 86 per cent in the rest of the region.

Such reporting will be expected by regulators for all listed firms from January 1 next year. Those failing to do so will have to provide explanations.

For the 119 constituents of the Hang Seng Composite LargeCap Index, such disclosure will become mandatory with no excuses accepted for financial years commencing on or after January 1, 2026.

Scope 3 emissions are part of the disclosure requirements recommended by the International Sustainability Standards Board for global securities regulators to adopt.

“If Hong Kong and mainland Chinese companies want to show global investors that they are really working hard on low carbon transition, they should be adhering to international disclosure standards to demonstrate their performance and make their profile more attractive,” Wang said.

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Fans swoon over most ‘handsome’ China scientist, 87, whose younger-self good looks resemble those of actor Daniel Wu

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3262632/fans-swoon-over-most-handsome-china-scientist-87-whose-younger-self-good-looks-resemble-those-actor?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s “most handsome” scientist – who in his younger days was said to resemble the famous Hong Kong-American actor Daniel Wu Neh-tsu – is getting a lot of attention online, but prefers not to emphasise his appearance.

Wang Demin, 87, a Eurasian petroleum scientist from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, pioneered the country’s petroleum field-layering and chemical oil recovery techniques.

He was given the title “academician” by China, the country’s highest level of honour awarded to those who have made significant contributions in their disciplines.

Intelligence and academic achievement run in Wang’s family.

His grandfather was a renowned Chinese surgeon, his father studied medicine in the US, and his Swiss mother speaks four languages.

Recently, a photo of him when he was young went viral due to his striking resemblance to 49-year-old American-born Hong Kong actor Daniel Wu Neh-tsu.

Wu is known for his rugged appearance and outstanding acting skills and acclaimed as a “flexible and distinctive actor” in the Chinese language film industry. His works include Westworld Season 4, The Heavenly Kings and New Police Story.

Responding to online attention to his looks, Wang said: “I’m just a technical guy researching petroleum. Let’s talk more about science.”

It is said that in his youth, he had many admirers but found them “intolerable distractions”.

Wang had strict demands for his girlfriend, including no walks in the park after marriage and no interruptions while reading, according to the media outlet NetEase News.

After university, Wang volunteered in Daqing Oil Field, an untouched resource at the time, according to his resume online.

At the age of 24, he proposed a geological pressure calculation formula called the “Songliao Method”.

This method is twice as accurate as the widely used Maximum-Rate Horner Method, according to the Voice of China, a flagship radio channel of China National Radio.

Wang also invented the Eccentrically Displaced Injection Method, significantly boosting extraction efficiency in the Daqing Oil Field.

This involves injecting fluids unevenly into a reservoir, creating paths for trapped oil to flow towards production wells.

Daqing is now one of China’s largest onshore oilfields, producing more than 40 million tons annually.

It boasts a 60 per cent extraction rate, far surpassing the global average of 33 per cent, according to the mainland news outlet, The Paper.

China’s official media described Wang’s contribution to the country’s petroleum field is “groundbreaking and advanced”.

In 2016, Wang even had an asteroid named after him.

He also said that working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, allows him to serve his country for an additional 30 years.

“The handsome appearance is the least noteworthy of his virtues,” one online observer on Weibo said.

“His intellectual depth is more remarkable. Let’s praise his scientific contributions rather than focus on his appearance,” said another.

What lesson does Stalin’s Cold War ‘mistake’ have for Russia, China and the US today? A Chinese historian weighs in

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3264153/what-lesson-does-stalins-cold-war-mistake-have-russia-china-and-us-today-chinese-historian-weighs?utm_source=rss_feed

The latest in our series of interviews with global thought leaders features Shen Zhihua, China’s leading expert on Cold War history. The son of a top Communist Party security official and a former navy pilot, Shen is now a tenured history professor at Shanghai’s East China Normal University and heads China’s only Cold War history research centre.

My basic view is that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants to go backwards and rebuild the Russian empire. You can see this in what he is doing in the Caucasus, Chechnya, Belarus and Ukraine – he wants to bring back into the sphere of influence places that had been separated. This is actually a security threat to China, but it is opposed by the US and the West.

Now the relationship between China and the US is not good, so once again China and Russia have a common enemy that pushes them to unite.

In my opinion, China should stick to its foreign policy of the early days of reform and opening up, not aligning with others or drawing lines based on ideology.

After the founding of the People’s Republic, China and North Korea were both in the socialist camp, and when relations between China and the Soviet Union were good in the 1950s, North Korea was like a little brother with two big brothers helping it.

However, Kim Il-sung was the leader of North Korea but his authority was given by [Joseph] Stalin, so generally North Korea still followed the Soviet Union.

After China-Soviet relations soured, Mao took a very important step, which was to withdraw all the People’s Volunteer Army forces stationed in North Korea. This meant that China would give North Korea full freedom. Otherwise, wouldn’t Beijing be controlling North Korea with 400,000 troops in such a small place?

So, after 1958, the Kim family established its supremacy in North Korea thanks to Mao. The split between China and the Soviet Union actually gave North Korea more room to survive, because the two countries were facing each other in Northeast Asia, so each wanted to draw North Korea closer. This left the triangular security structure of China-North Korea-Soviet Union unchanged.

But later, after US-China relations thawed, the landscape of Northeast Asia changed. China’s diplomatic goal was to unite the US against the Soviet Union, and North Korea’s diplomatic goal was to unite the Soviet Union against the US, and the three came into conflict.

China wanted to join with the US in the triangular structure with South Korea against the Soviet Union, while at the same time defending the interests of North Korea. But the US had to defend South Korea’s interests.

After the end of the Cold War, this structure became even more confused. Both China and the Soviet Union recognised South Korea. The US at that point said it wanted cross-recognition, but in fact neither the US nor Japan later recognised North Korea. So the six-party talks were needed to deal with the North Korean nuclear crisis, but that has not been resolved as of today.

Now that the relationship between China and the US is strained again, this issue is becoming more complicated.

I haven’t done a specific study on what’s happening now. But I have observed that Russia is now very close to North Korea. Since the deterioration of relations between China and the US, the military alliance between the US, South Korea and Japan has also grown closer.

There is a tendency to return to the pattern of confrontation between the north triangle and the south triangle. But I think it would be dangerous to go that far and possibly trigger a full-scale conflict. China should be cautious in this regard.

The first obstacle is that the archives are not open to society and scholars.

The second is ideological restrictions, especially on textbooks and the findings of academics. There are certain views that have been formed that just cannot be changed. That does not work. As science develops and historical archives continue to be opened, people’s interpretations of history will certainly change.

How can you get to the real history if you do not address these two issues?

I do not want to say too much about the current state of China-North Korea relations. Zhao Leji’s visit to North Korea after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s visit to China may give the wrong signal to the international community – is China going to join their alliance? China should make its diplomatic position clear.

I had two sources. The first was the Russian archives. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russians compiled many archival collections, such as specialised archives on the German question, the Polish question, the military question and the economic question. This part of the archive was very large, and for a while after the collapse of the Soviet Union the management of the local archives was rather chaotic, and I found some of them when I went to Russia in the 1990s.

These archives had many limitations, but something was better than nothing.

There are also the American archives, which are more disciplined and open, and their declassification is strictly enforced by law. Once they reach the 25th year, researchers have the right to ask the authorities to declassify them.

These archives are adequate, like the diplomatic archives I often look at.

China is the worst in terms of the openness of its archives, because they are basically not open to the public. It is very difficult to go into any archive these days and see any material.

The declassification of diplomatic archives can represent the modernisation of a country. The foreign ministry archives were declassified in 2004, which was a sensation. But then it was slowly closed down, perhaps because they felt it was rather sensitive.

North Korea’s archives have never been made public, so no one has ever seen them. There are two channels for us to look at North Korean material.

One is what North Korea has published publicly, including the Workers’ Party yearbook, Kim Il-sung’s writings, [official mouthpiece] Rodong Sinmun and some open magazines.

But this is not enough, because what is published is not always true, or at least not complete.

Another source is the record of North Korea’s interactions with other countries. Contacts between diplomats, for example, have been recorded and reported by the other side. Especially numerous were those from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. China also has many records, but China does not declassify them.

The Cold War is the phase of history that is closest to us. The structure and development of international relations today have been influenced by it. So we should know how it happened, developed and ended. In this way, we can properly learn the historical lessons. We must not make the mistakes that Stalin made.

This history will also give us a clearer understanding of the changes that are happening now – the full-scale competition between China and the United States.

Academics have been studying the Cold War for decades, and there are a number of works in English. But there has not been much in-depth research on the subject in China.

In 2017, I was inspired by the trade war between the US and China. At that time, I thought that the relationship between China and the US was quite good, so why was there a trade war all of a sudden? So I wanted to take a fresh look at the history of the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union before the beginning of the Cold War.

I found that in the past, studies of the origins of the Cold War had largely been conducted in the context of international politics, including security issues, geopolitical issues, and ideological issues. However, very few people had analysed the role played by the economic relations between the two countries in plunging them into the vortex of the Cold War.

The disagreements between the US and the Soviet Union after the second world war were fundamentally economic, including the issues of US leases and loans to the Soviet Union, German reparations to the Allies, and the Bretton Woods system.

To put it simply, the US designed a post-war international economic structure (including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the proposed but unformed International Trade Organisation) in the hope that the world’s major powers, especially the Soviet Union, would join it. But the Soviet Union, after much deliberation, declined to sign in December 1945, and the US began to have strategic doubts about the Soviet Union’s rejection of international cooperation.

Before this failure, the long but ultimately unsuccessful negotiations between the two sides over the issue of US loans to the Soviet Union was the first domino to fall in cutting the Soviet Union out of the US-dominated global economic system.

The refusal of Moscow and its satellite states to participate in the Marshall Plan for Europe in July 1947 showed that the Soviet Union had decided to cut itself off from the US and its Western world.

Both of these ruptures in US-Soviet relations took place in the economic sphere, suggesting that the post-war world was divided primarily by the failure to establish an international economic organisation

Therefore, the systemic confrontation during the Cold War first manifested itself in the economy, and the onset of the Cold War began with an economic decoupling.

In this process, both the US and the Soviet Union had strategic misunderstandings about each other, influenced by ideology.

I think the most fundamental mistake Stalin made was to completely decouple [the Soviet Union] from the US and create an internal cycle within the socialist camp. So there cannot be economic decoupling.

After the second world war, economic integration was a growing trend, but because of the conflicts between the US and the Soviet Union, economic cuts were artificially created.

Stalin was worried that if he could not cooperate with the West, he would have to control all the countries in his sphere of influence, otherwise he would be pushed away by the West and the Soviet Union would be isolated.

Therefore, after deciding not to join the Bretton Woods system, the Soviet Union organised its own Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon). Stalin later proposed “two parallel world markets” to cut off the Western countries.

This was extremely damaging for the Soviet Union. The economic circle of the socialist camp was cut off from the outside world, preventing the exchange of goods and technology. They did not benefit from the rapid development of the other side. Twenty years later, the economic gap had widened.

In terms of GDP, the Soviet economy was still developed in the 1970s because of its heavy industry base. But in reality, the gap between it and the US in science and technology was growing. This was because the Soviet Union’s capabilities were concentrated in the defence industry.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Eastern European countries were slowly drawn into international economic organisations.

By the time of [former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev’s reforms, the Soviet Union had also begun to apply for membership of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, but about a month after it was accepted, the Soviet Union collapsed.

History cannot be unlived. But I believe that the Cold War was not inevitable. According to my research, every step that led to the Cold War had a chance of being reversed, but the US and the Soviet Union still fell into the abyss of the Cold War.

In terms of the causal relationship between changes in diplomatic and economic policy, the hardening of the US diplomatic approach towards the Soviet Union was a prerequisite for a complete change in economic policy, while the overall shift in the Soviet Union’s diplomatic approach towards the US was the result of a complete disappointment with the US in economic policy.

Thus, looking at the process of the Cold War, it was undoubtedly the US that started the “engine”. But the Soviet Union was not innocent. On the one hand, it is often said that the US misinterpreted the motives of the Soviet Union, and while there was certainly an ideological bias inherent in US policymakers, in many cases it was Moscow’s inappropriate or aggressive behaviour that triggered the misinterpretation and provided Washington with the tools to change its policy and mobilise public opinion.

Returning to today’s US-China relations with the lessons of this history, we can conclude that every detail matters.

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China’s middle class still jittery about spending – especially on property, survey finds

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3264152/chinas-middle-class-still-jittery-about-spending-especially-property-survey-finds?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s middle-class families remain cautious about spending – particularly on property – despite repeated government efforts to loosen household purse strings, according to a university study.

In their quarterly survey of household wealth and income released on Thursday, researchers at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, found that their index of families’ future spending expectations was even lower than the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the China Household Wealth Index Survey conducted by the university’s Survey and Research Centre for China Household Finance the index of spending expectations fell to 101.9 in the first quarter of this year, down from 103.0 in the fourth quarter of 2023.

A reading of 100 is the dividing line between expansion in spending plans and contraction.

The latest reading is even lower than the 102.6 result for the second quarter of 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic began to bite the economy.

The survey measures the spending plans of households with an average of 1.5 million yuan (US$207,000) in combined property and financial assets, and an average household income of 170,000 yuan.

With exports facing external headwinds and in debt weighing on investment prospects, Beijing has pinned high hopes on consumption helping to drive the economy.

China’s GDP expanded 5.3 per cent year on year in the first quarter, with domestic consumption contributing 73.7 per cent to economic growth, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Retail sales of consumer goods, a major indicator of the country’s consumption strength, rose 4.7 per cent year on year in the first quarter of this year.

But outlays in discretionary areas such as travel and entertainment have largely remained at pandemic lows, although rising to 99.6 in the first quarter from 97.5 three months earlier.

The families in the survey were particularly cautious about buying real estate, with the proportion of households buying new homes falling to 6.4 per cent in the first quarter of this year from 7.5 per cent in the final quarter of 2023.

Only 6.8 per cent of households said they planned to buy property in the next three months, while 20.1 per cent of households said they would take a wait-and-see approach, the survey found.

The fall reflected a broader decline in investment in the country’s real estate sector, which fell 9.8 per cent year on year in the first four months of 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The amount of floor space sold fell 20.2 per cent in the same period.

However, expectations about economic prospects rose a little.

The report on the university’s survey also said that 62.3 per cent of respondents were not optimistic about economic prospects in the next 12 months, down slightly from 66.4 per cent three months earlier.

Expectations of job stability were still in the contraction range below the threshold 100, at 98.3, but better than 95.8 in the previous quarter.

Household debt across all income groups rose, particularly among low-income households with an annual income of 100,000 yuan or less.

The authors of the report said the results reflected greater economic pressure faced by these households and authorities should consider tax incentives for middle- and low-income families to ease that burden.

While the surveyed households showed enthusiasm for investing in precious metals, enrolments in the national private pension scheme launched in November 2022, did not meet policy expectations. By the end of last year, 50 million people opened personal pension accounts, but only 22 per cent of the account holders had actually made deposits, the report said.

About two-thirds of respondents cited a lack of understanding of the policy or concerns about policy changes, and 32.6 per cent were worried about being unable to withdraw investments before retirement or limited tax incentives.